What Really HappenedinNanking
The Refutation of a Common Mythby Tanaka Masaaki

Translated by Sekai Shuppan

Sekai Shuppan, Inc. TokyoPublished by Sekai Shuppan, Inc.
Shin Sakuma Bldg., 3F
2-13-14, Nishu-Shimbashi,
Minato-ku, Tokyo, 105-0003
Japan
C 2000 by Tanaka Masaaki
Copyright○
Original Japanese language edition
published by Kenkosha. Tokyo, Japan, 1987.
English translation wrights
owned by Sekai Shuppan, Inc.
All rights reserved,
Including the right of reproductionin whole or in part in any form.

Cover design by Hidaka Miki.
Printed in Japan.
ISBN 4-916079-07-8

Table of Contents
Foreword by Kobori Keiichiro, Ph. D.
Introduction
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17

Defining “Massacre” 1
The Population of Nanking in 1937 3
Nanking’s Population Swells as Residents Return 7
The “Mountains of Dead Bodies” That No One Saw 10
The International Committee’s Statistics on Crimes Attributed to JapaneseMilitary Personnel 15
Japanese Quickly Restoring Order in the Safety Zone 21
The Fabricated Reports of Mass Murders of Prisoners of War 26
The Manufactured Chongshangtan Burial Records 33
Professor Smythe’s Report on War Damage in the Nanking Area 40
Gen. He Yingqin’s Military Report 43
No mention of the “Nanking Massacre” in Chinese Communist Party
Records 47
No Protest Against the “Nanking Massacre” Submitted to the League of
Nations 50
No Protest Against the “Nanking Massacre” from the United States, Great
Brain, or France 52
No Mention of the “Nanking Massacre” in the American or British Press
53
No Gag Order Imposed by the Japanese in Connection with the Nanking
Incident 61
A Massacre without Witnesses 63
Faked versus Authentic Photographs: A World of Difference 73
Notes 89
About the Author 101iFOREWORD
The word history possesses two meanings. One is “events of the past in and of themselves.”
The other is “a record of events of the past put into writing for the benefit of future
generations” (historiography). Before writing was invented, history was transmitted orally(and still is today in communities lacking a writing system). Once writing was invented andliteracy became widespread, the oral tradition gave way to written records, the literature ofhistory. Today, when we speak of history, we are usually referring to historiography, i.e.,
historical literature — the events of the past as expressed in writing.

Our perception of history derives from past events as transmitted via the written word,
not from the events themselves. Is it possible for us to obtain an accurate
understanding of past events? This is, epistemologically, a difficult question to answer.
However, we must avoid the pitfalls of agnosticism, which is both nihilistic andunproductive, and resign ourselves to our fate as mere mortals: We cannot aspire to a
totally accurate comprehension of historical facts through the medium of the written
word, but we can arrive at an understanding that is a very close approximation.
Historical researchers must be aware of these possibilities (and limitations) before
they embark on this intellectual activity. However, the transformation of the events ofthe past into the written word must always be guided by a conscientious effort torepresent those events as authentically as possible. All historiographers who commit
the fruits of their research to paper shoulder a weighty ethical responsibility, which
involves selecting their words, the medium of facts, with the utmost care.
Unfortunately, those who engage in the recounting of history, a most sacred undertaking, do
not always take this responsibility seriously. Some “historiographers” make no effort tochoose words that most closely resemble the truth. Worse, they approach the task of writing
history with the attitude that their use of forceful language will convince readers that they areconveying information that very closely resembles historical fact. They are unqualified topractice the art of historiography precisely because they do not have the requisite respect for
the reasoning process (logos), on which their words should rightly be based. Nevertheless,
we are confronted with many such charlatans who invent or intentionally misrepresent
history and, regrettably, there is little we can do to stop them.
During the modern era, inventors of history found the perfect arena for their misdeeds — the
IMTFE (International Military Tribune for the Far East, commonly known as the “Tokyo
Trials”), held between 1946 and 1948 in Japan’s capital, Tokyo. For their main theme, they
selected the Nanking Incident. Out of the occupation of the Nationalist Chinese capital by theJapanese military, which occurred during the course of a war, and which was otherwise
unremarkable, they manufactured the “Nanking Massacre.” Their handiwork soon gave rise to
the illusion that their invention was fact. The illusion continued to gain force, until it becameiientrenched in the literature of history, as fact. The creation of the “Nanking Massacre” can be
attributed to the Allied nations that prosecuted “war criminals” at the Tokyo Trials, and to the
Republic of China which, lacking the conscience that inspires respect for the words of men,entered into a conspiracy with the witnesses it dispatched to the tribunal, where they lied on thewitness stand. From the opening of the Tokyo Trials in 1946 until April 1952, when the Treatyof Peace was signed in San Francisco and the sovereignty of Japan was restored, the citizens ofJapan, an occupied nation, were unable to denounce or protest the fabrication of history
perpetrated at the tribunal. Wrested of freedom of speech, they were powerless to object to theshower of baseless slanders and charges of nonexistent war crimes that fell upon them. During
the Occupation, which spanned nearly seven years, the sins committed by the Japanese military
in Nanking, products of their inventors’ imaginations, were persistently and repeatedly broadcast
throughout the world. This propaganda was spectacularly successful; it was embraced as fact by
the international community, and engendered an inexorable, undeserved prejudice.
In April 1952, with freedom of speech finally restored to them, Japanese scholars debated the
Nanking Incident, and exposed it for what it was — the falsest of falsehoods. They thenattempted to share the information they had acquired in the hope of refuting the notion of a
“Nanking Massacre.” However, by that time, the aforementioned prejudice had become sowidespread and so entrenched in the collective memory that it seemed impossible to dispel.
But once roused to action, Japan’s scholars persevered. They were painfully aware of their
responsibility toward the written word, and could not sit by in silence while the minds of thepeople of the world were being clouded by vicious Chinese propaganda. The work of every
scholar who joined in this quest is significant, and there are quite a few books that I would be
happy to recommend to English-speaking readers, since they describe events as they actually
took place.
Among them, I have singled out the writings of Tanaka Masaaki. They merit special mention,
since Mr. Tanaka was the pioneer in the search for the truth about the Nanking Incident. He
began work on his refutation of the “Nanking Massacre” while the Tokyo Trials were still insession. Once freedom of speech was restored, he began to write in earnest. Over a period ofnearly 50 years, he has honed his arguments, subjecting his writings to constant reanalysis andrevision. In What Really Happened in Nanking, his definitive work on the subject, Mr. Tanaka
presents judiciously reasoned arguments. Furthermore, his respect for the virtue and power(logos) of words is obvious, as is his dedication to the historiographer’s mission: to portray theevents of history as accurately as is humanly possible.
It is my fervent hope that English speakers throughout the world will put aside any
preconceptions they may harbor, and afford this book the audience that it so richly deserves.
Kobori Keiichiro, Ph.D.
Professor emeritus, Tokyo Universityiii

INTRODUCTION
The recent emergence of a problem that has affected Japan-U.S. relations is a serious cause forconcern. At the root of this problem are allegations made by Chinese-American writer Iris Chang
in her book entitled The Rape of Nanking (published in the United States in 1997) and the antiJapanese campaigns it has instigated. The book’s subtitle, The Forgotten Holocaust of WorldWar II, likens what Chang refers to as the “Nanking Massacre” to Nazi attempts to exterminate
the Jews.
In the first place, Japan resolved not to discriminate against Jews in the “Outline of Measures
Towards Jewish Peoples” (1938)1, and ultimately saved a significant number of Jews from the
Holocaust.2 Chang’s portrayal of Japan as a nation complicit in the Holocaust — any holocaust—betrays her ignorance (and temerity).
The inflammatory prose that characterizes The Rape of Nanking is rife with accusations that are
simply untrue and descriptions of despicable, horrific crimes that were never committed. The
photographs she includes (12 pages) are, without exception, fakes.
Nevertheless, this book has succeeded in engendering hatred of Japan and the Japanese in thehearts of Americans, though the great majority of them neither knew about nor were interested in
the hostilities that took place in Nanking 63 years ago prior to its publication. Thanks to theenergetic support and propagandizing of Chinese activist groups based in the United States, The
Rape of Nanking quickly became a bestseller, with more than 500,000 copies sold to date. It has
also created political tension between the two nations. For instance, in August 1999, theCalifornia State Assembly passed a resolution (AJR 27) urging Japan to apologize for wartime
atrocities and to pay reparations to the victims of those atrocities.
How did the Japanese government respond to these insults? Saito Kunihiko, Japan’s ambassador
to the United States, agreed to enter into a televised dialogue with Chang. However, during the
dialogue, he uttered not one word of protest against Chang’s lies, hyperbole, and propaganda. Mr.
Saito’s only response was to state that Japanese history textbooks do indeed contain accounts of
the Nanking Incident (until recently, this term was used to describe the battles that were waged
in and around Nanking and the subsequent occupation — nothing more). The journalists who
had comprised the studio audience then reported in the American media that the Japanese
government had corroborated Chang’s allegations, i.e., that the Japanese massacred 300,000
Chinese in Nanking, and they are now teaching their children about the massacre via accounts intextbooks.
Matsui Iwane was, without question, the most illustrious Japanese officer of his time. He
graduated from the Military Staff College at the head of his class, for which achievement
Emperor Showa presented him with a Japanese sword. Soon thereafter, Matsui was posted toChina, where he remained for 16 years, and supported Sun Yatsen in his second revolution
against Yuan Shikai. A staunch advocate of a united Asia, Matsui was the Army’s China expert.
iv

When fighting broke out between the Japanese and Chinese in Shanghai in 1937, theHeadquarters of the General Staff dispatched the Shanghai Expeditionary Force and ordered Gen.
Matsui into active service as its commander-in-chief. The Japanese had only 25,000 men at theirdisposal, while the Chinese had 300,000. Japanese military authorities, realizing thatreinforcements were required, mobilized the 10th Army, commanded by Lt.-Gen. Yanagawa
Heisuke, which landed at Hangzhou on November 5. The Japanese emerged victorious. On
December 1, Tada Hayao, Subchief of the General Staff, flew to Shanghai and issued the order
to attack Nanking. The 10th Army and the Shanghai Expeditionary Force were combined to form
the Central China Area Army, of which Gen. Matsui was appointed commander-in-chief.
The Central China Area Army then advanced to Nanking. Gen. Matsui issued a warning toNanking Defense Corps commander-in-chief Tang Shengzhi, urging him to open the gates of thecity and admit Japanese troops without offering any resistance, but the warning was rejected. On
December 10, the Japanese decided to launch a massive assault on Nanking. Gen. Matsui
gathered his subordinates and conveyed the following instructions: “The entrance of the Imperial
Army into the capital of a foreign nation is an historic event. The attention of the world will befocused on you. You are to observe military regulations to the letter, to set an example for the
future.” He ensured that all his men received a map of Nanking and vicinity, with the Zhongshan
Tomb (where Sun Yatsen is interred), the Mingxiao Tomb, foreign legations, and other places
where they were prohibited from entering clearly marked, and ordered sentries to be posted ateach one of them. He added, “Anyone who loots or starts a fire, even accidentally, will beseverely punished.”
On December 13, Nanking fell to the Japanese. They made a ceremonial entry into the city on
December 17, and on the following day, held a memorial service for the war dead. Concernedthat no one would be praying for the repose of their souls, Gen. Matsui proposed that the Chinese
war dead be honored at the same service. However, staff officers and division commanders
objected; the service was held only for Japanese soldiers killed in action. Even after Gen. Matsui
returned to Japan, his sentiments did not change. In 1940, he erected a shrine dedicated to aunited Asia in honor both the Japanese and Chinese war dead, on Mt. Izu in Atami.

v

According to an essay he wrote about the construction of the shrine, Gen. Matsui verymuch regretted having to wage war with a neighboring nation, especially one that headmired. However, he believed that the conflict would eventually go down in history as arighteous war that had ultimately rescued the peoples of East Asia from European
domination and lay the foundation for their independence. Gen. Matsui prophesied thatan Asian revival was imminent.
To soil that he had had shipped to Japan from the battlefields of Central China, stainedwith the blood of both Japanese and Chinese soldiers, Gen. Matsui added Japanese clay.
He then commissioned master potter Shibayama Seifu to create a statue of Kannon, thegoddess of mercy measuring 3.3 meters in height. He commissioned Kato Haruji,
awarded Living National Treasure status by the Japanese government, to craft anotherstatue of Kannon (60.6 cm high) for the main hall of the shrine. To the right of this statue,
Gen. Matsui had a memorial tablet honoring Japanese soldiers killed in action, and to its
left, an identical tablet for the Nationalist soldiers. Surplus lumber from the Atsuta Shrine
in Nagoya was used to build the main hall. For the solemn consecration ceremony, thevenerable priest Tessui was summoned from Tokyo. Would an officer as honorable andethical as Gen. Matsui have ordered or sanctioned the massacre of 300,000 Chinese?
In March 1938, Gen. Matsui returned to Japan from Nanking. After reporting to theEmperor, he visited army hospitals in Osaka, Nagoya, Sendai and other parts of Japan,
comforting his wounded or ailing subordinates. I accompanied him on these visits. At
some point during our travels, he told me that he wondered whether Nanking was still apeaceful, orderly city, and asked me to go there to investigate.
In June 1938, six months after the fall of Nanking, I inspected former battle sites at
Yuhuatai, Zijinshan, Xiaguan, and Xinhezhen. Additionally, I explored every inch of
Nanking. The population had already risen to nearly 400,000. Merchants were prospering,and the city was safe enough for women to venture out alone at night. I submitted a reportto that effect to Gen. Matsui.
In 1942, at the age of 32, I was drafted into the Army. I was assigned to the Central China
Field Ordnance Depot in Shanghai. I heard Emperor Showa’s radio broadcast announcing
the end of World War II at the Branch Ordnance Depot in Wuxi, in 1945. By the time I
returned to my home in Nagano, it was April 1946.
I learned that Gen. Matsui had been charged with Class A war crimes, and had been
incarcerated at Sugamo Prison in Tokyo. I travelled from Nagano three times to visit him.
He told me that he had never heard a word about a massacre in Nanking until the Tokyo
Trials began. He had left Nanking for Shanghai a week after the ceremonial entry intothat city. At two press conferences he held for foreign journalists, no one mentioned a
massacre.
Sixth Division commander Lt.-Gen. Tani Hisao, who was sentenced to death at a war
crimes trial held in Nanking, said that he was astonished when he first heard about thevi“massacre.” He hadn’t heard anything about one from his subordinates or anyone else,
for that matter.
When I heard that William Webb, the presiding justice at the Tokyo Trials, had sentenced
Gen. Matsui, the man whom I respected more than anyone else on earth, to death byhanging, I was devastated — so much so that I couldn’t eat. To console myself, and in thehope of spreading the truth to the widest audience possible, I began to write. My firstbook was Justice Radhabinod Pal3Absolves Japan.4 Later, I produced four more books:
The Truth About the Tokyo Trials,5 The Fabrication of the Nanking Massacre,6 The War
Journal of General Matsui Iwane,7 and What Really Happened in Nanking: The
Refutation of a Common Myth.8
I believe that What Really Happened in Nanking is my representative work, the fruit oflong years of research on this subject, and tells the true story of what happened in
Nanking. The English-language version contains only part of the original book, but it
covers all the main points made therein. I urge American researchers, politicians, scholars,
journalists, and opinion leaders to read it. Once they have, I am convinced that they will
arrive at the realization that violations of international law of the magnitude alleged by
Iris Chang in The Rape of Nanking (more than 300,000 murders and 80,000 rapes) never
took place.
This problem threatens not only Japan-U.S. relations, but also world peace. Both nations
must be careful to avoid being misled by misinterpretations and demagoguery, and makean earnest effort to seek the truth.
In conclusion, I would like thank Professor Kobori Keiichiro for contributing the
Foreword. To Mr. Moteki Hiromichi, president of Sekai Shuppan Co., I offer my deepest
appreciation for his encouragement, and for shouldering the responsibility for all mattersrelating to the translation and publication of this book.

vii

viii

Chapter 1

Defining “Massacre”
Some refer to the hostilities that took place in Nanking in December 1937 and events that
followed them as a massacre. Before we begin our examination of the “Nanking
Massacre,” we must first define the word massacre. Otherwise, we may repeat a mistakethat others have made and view combatants who lost their lives as victims of a massacre.
A major battle was fought in Nanking, and it claimed the lives of a large number ofsoldiers. The Battle of Iwo Jima, waged between Japanese and American forces, claimed
many more lives (at least 27,000), but no one speaks of an “Iwo Jima Massacre.”
Since international law does not define “massacre” per se, we shall construe the word as
the unlawful, premeditated, methodical killing of large numbers of innocent people. We
are saddened by the claims that Japanese military personnel were guilty of a massacre in
Nanking, and that all who died during or as a result of the hostilities — be they soldiers
who died in combat, stragglers killed during subsequent sweeps, or Chinese troops
masquerading as civilians, who were apprehended and executed — were victims of a
massacre. However, we are confident that anyone who reads this book will realize that
nothing remotely resembling a massacre took place in Nanking.
At the IMTFE (International Military Tribune for the Far East, also known as the “Tokyo
Trials”), the prosecution made various assertions as to the number of persons massacredin Nanking: 127,000, 200,000, and 100,000.9 In recent years, the original, postwar
Chinese claim of 300,000 victims has escalated to 400,000.
Even among Japanese scholars, the number of “victims” varies considerably. Former
Waseda University professor Hora Tomio, a historian and arguably the leading proponentof the “massacre” argument, believes there were 200,000 victims. Nihon University
professor Hata Ikuhiko, who is viewed as a moderate in this controversy, has arrived at
the figure of 40,000. Independent researchers Itakura Yoshiaki and Unemoto Masami,
both of whom oppose the “massacre” theory, have posited 6,000-13,000 and 3,000-6,000,
respectively. The bases for the various arguments (or the lack thereof) aside, the real
problem that we face is the way in which persons who lost their lives during or after the
conflict are classified: noncombatants, soldiers disguised as civilians, soldiers who
surrendered, prisoners of war, and stragglers. Each category is different in nature. We
believe that the following classification system used by Unemoto in Eyewitness Accountsof the Battle of Nanking is the most accurate.

１CategoryCause of Death

Combat casualties

(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)

Soldiers who died while defending Nanking
Soldiers who were shot to death while retreating or fleeing
Soldiers who were shot to death during the hunt for stragglers
Soldiers disguised as civilians who were apprehended andexecuted

Combat-related casualties

(1)
(2)

Individual soldiers who surrendered and were later killed
Civilians who remained in the battle zone to aid Chinese
troops, or who were caught up entangled in the hostilities anddied as a result
Civilians who were killed accidentally during the hunt forsoldiers masquerading as civilians(3)
Unlawful acts

(1)
(2)

Groups of prisoners of war or individual prisoners of war who
were incarcerated and subsequently executed
Innocent civilians (including women and children) who were
killedSource: Unemoto Masami, “Shogen ni yoru Nankin senshi” (Eyewitness Accounts of the Battle of
Nanking) (Tokyo: Kaiko, February 1985), Part 11.

Once the victims of the hostilities in Nanking have been properly classified, we discover that the
majority of them died in combat or of combat-related causes. Far fewer deaths were the result of
unlawful acts. It is true that Chinese soldiers who had surrendered were occasionally shot on the
spot due to extenuating circumstances. And some civilians were killed accidentally during
searches for soldiers who had donned civilian clothing and infiltrated the Safety Zone. (Themembers of the International Committee must bear the responsibility for civilian deaths, since
they tolerated the presence of armed Chinese combatants in the Safety Zone.) However
regrettable, tragedies like these were an inevitable byproduct of war.
No contemporaneous account refers to the mass murder of innocent civilians in Nanking. We
will discuss this subject in greater depth later on in this book. But we wish to emphasize that theissue at hand is the number of deaths attributable to unlawful acts. It is our earnest hope thatreaders will be mindful of this distinction as they consider the arguments presented in this book.

2

Chapter 2

The Population of Nanking In 1937
The first issue that must be addressed in any discussion of the Nanking Incident is: What was
the population of Nanking when the Japanese attacked in February 1937?
On December 1, 1937, Ma Chaojun, the mayor of Nanking, ordered all residents to takerefuge in a zone administered by the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone.
After providing the Committee with rice, wheat, currency, and a few police officers, Ma fled
Nanking on the heels of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and other Nationalist leaders. By
that time, Nanking’s wealthy and middle-class residents, as well as the city’s government
officials, had already fled to the upper reaches of the Yangtze. The majority of thoseremaining in Nanking were the poor, who lacked the means to travel elsewhere.
At that time, Nanking was the capital of China. The word “capital” usually evokes an imageof a huge city, but Nanking is far smaller than Kyoto, Beijing, or Shanghai. Furthermore,
within its narrow confines were an airfield, low mountains, and farms.
According to a 1937 map, Nanking measured five kilometers from east to west. It waspossible to walk from the largest gate, Zhongshan Gate, to Hanzhong Gate in about an hour.
From Zhonghua Gate at the south end of the city, one could walk the 11 kilometers to
Yijiang Gate, at the north end, in less than two-and-a-half hours. Nanking occupied an areaof approximately 40 square kilometers (if one includes Xiaguan, which is outside the city
limits), roughly equivalent to that of Manhattan Island (57 square kilometers).
The Safety Zone was established in a 3.8-square-kilometer area of Nanking, about the size of
New York City’s Central Park (3.40 square kilometers). It was administered by the International
Committee, all of whose members were citizens of foreign nations. They gathered all theresidents into the Safety Zone and endeavored to feed and house them. Between December 13(the day the Japanese breached the gates of Nanking) and February 9, 1938, the International
Committee issued 61 missives addressed and hand-delivered to the Japanese, American, British,
and German embassies, on an almost daily basis. Most of them are of complaints about
misconduct on the part of Japanese military personnel or requests to military authorities for
improved public safety or food supplies. These 61 documents are contemporaneous records, andshould certainly be considered primary sources. Unfortunately, the Japanese Foreign Ministryburned them toward the end of World War II, so the Embassy’s copies are no longer extant. But
they were compiled by Dr. Hsü Shuhsi, a professor at Beijing University, under the title
Documents of the Nanking Safety Zone. They also appear in their entirety in What War Means,10
edited by Manchester Guardian correspondent Harold Timperley, and were submitted as
evidence to the IMTFE. As shown in the photograph on p. 4, the version edited by Hsü Shuhsi
bears the imprimatur of the Nationalist government: “Prepared under the auspices of the Councilof International Affairs, Chunking.” It was published by the Shanghai firm Kelly & Walsh in
1939. Any treatment of the Nanking Incident that disregards these valuable resources is suspect.

3

4

There are four references to the population of Nanking in late 1937 in Documents of the Nanking
Safety Zone; all of them state that the total refugee population was 200,000.11 A report written byJames Espy, vice-consul at the American Embassy, and dispatched to the United States, andanother report written by John Rabe, chairman of the International Committee, also mention that
Nanking’s population was 200,000.
However, Frankfurter Zeitung correspondent Lily Abegg, who escaped from Nanking
immediately before the city fell, wrote the following in an article dispatched from Hankou.
Last week about 200,000 people left Nanking. One million souls once inhabitedthe city, but their numbers had dwindled to 350,000. Now there are at most
150,000 people remaining, but waves of evacuees seem interminable.12
Maj. Zhang Qunsi, who was taken prisoner by the Japanese, said that there were 50,000 Nanking
Defense Corps soldiers and 100,000 noncombatants in the city. Another prisoner, Maj.-Gen. Liu
Qixiong, who was later appointed head of the Nanking Military Academy (during Wang
Zhaoming’s administration), and who commanded the brigade that defended the Yuhuatai
position, described the population of Nanking as “approximately 200,000.” In an entry in his war
journal dated December 20, Gen. Matsui wrote, “There are 120,000 Chinese in the Refugee Zone,
most of them poor people.”13
Taking all these sources into account, we can state with certainty that the population of Nanking
at the end of 1937 was at least 120,000, and at most 200,000. We know from contemporaneousrecords that the members of the Nanking Defense Corps, under the command of Tang Shengzhi,
numbered between 35,000 and 50,000. We can therefore estimate the population of Nanking at
no less than 160,000 and no more than 250,000. Even if the Japanese had murdered every single
member of the Nanking Defense Corps and every single civilian, they could not have killed morethan 160,000-250,000 Chinese. To massacre 300,000 persons, they would have had to kill manyof them twice.
When confronted with these figures, proponents of the massacre theory attempt to enlarge thecivilian population of Nanking. For instance, Hora Tomio writes:
When the Japanese military commenced its attack on Nanking, there werereportedly between 250,000 and 300,000 residents remaining in the city.
Reports have it that after stragglers were eliminated during the sweep, there were
nearly 200,000 persons residing in Nanking.
Therefore, by the process of subtraction, we arrive at a total of 50,000-100,000
massacre victims.14 [Italics supplied.]
His repeated use of phrasing like “reportedly” and “reports have it” implies that his sources are,at best, rumors. Rumors do not constitute proof. Hora is simply allowing his imagination to run
away with itself, or guessing. None of his claims is the least bit reliable.
5Like Hora, the authors of Testimony: The Great Nanking Massacre have inflated the populationof Nanking to support their accusation that 300,000-400,000 persons were massacred.
According to our research, the population of the Safety Zone, at its highest, was
290,000. When the massacre was nearing an end, and the enemy was forcing the
refugees to leave the Safety Zone, it claimed that the population was 250,000.
Therefore, the population had decreased by 40,000 in less than two months. There
were many reasons for that decrease, but the primary reason was, without a doubt,
the enemy’s massacre of huge numbers of refugees.15
What is the source for the figure of 290,000? Like Hora, the authors offer no proof. Iris Chang
has inflated the figures even further.
If half of the population of Nanking fled into the Safety Zone during the worst of
the massacre, then the other half — almost everyone who did not make it to thezone — probably died at the hands of the Japanese.16
In a letter to the Japanese Embassy dated December 17, 1937, John Rabe, chairman of theInternational Committee, wrote: “On the 13th when your troops entered the city, we had
nearly all the civilian population gathered in a Zone.”17 Chang either disregarded thisdocument or failed to consult it. Whatever the case, she has invented a group of people
residing outside the Safety Zone, and numbering 200,000-300,000.
At the IMTFE, defense attorney Levin broached a question that pierced the heart of thisproblem.
Mr. Brooks calls my attention to the fact that in another portion of theaffidavit is contained the statement that 300,000 were killed in Nanking,and as I understand it the total population of Nanking is only 200,000.
Flustered, William Webb, the presiding justice, replied, “Well, you may have evidence ofthat, but you cannot get it in at this stage,” thus suppressing any further discussion of thematter.18
Therefore, the question of the actual population of Nanking was never addressed at the
IMTFE, and a most bizarre judgement was handed down, in which the (unsubstantiated)
number of massacre victims was stated variously as 100,000, 200,000, 127,000, etc.
Since then, proponents of the massacre have avoided the population issue, resorted toguesswork (Hora), or invented their own statistics, as Iris Chang did.

6

Chapter 3

Nanking’s Population Swells as Residents ReturnA decline in the population of Nanking following the battles fought there would lend
support to assertions that a massacre was perpetrated there by Japanese troops. However,the population did not decline — it ballooned.
We refer readers to the table accompanying this chapter, which we have compiled from
population statistics appearing in Documents of the Nanking Safety Zone and in the
diaries of John Rabe, chairman of the International Committee. Documents of the
Nanking Safety Zone is a primary source consisting of 61 missives sent by theInternational Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone to the Japanese Embassy as well as
the embassies of the United States, Great Britain, and Germany. The International
Committee undertook the task of feeding the refugees in the Safety Zone and, therefore,
its members needed to know how many there were.
Documents dated December 17, 21, and 27 state that there were 200,000 refugees in
Nanking. However, by January 14, the population had swelled to 250,000, where it
remained until the end of February. Most of the increase can be accounted for by
returning residents, who had fled to outlying areas to avoid the hostilities.
When the word spread that order had been restored to Nanking, streams of people entered
the city and began preparations for the New Year holiday. According to the prosecution’s
general summation at the IMTFE, “Once the Japanese soldiers had obtained complete
command of the city, an orgy of rape, murder, torture and pillage broke out and continued
for six weeks.”19 This was an outright lie. Who would be foolish enough to return to acity where a massacre and unspeakable atrocities were taking place?
From late December through early January, Japanese troops issued 160,000 civilian
passports to refugees in the Safety Zone during their attempts to ferret out Chinese
soldiers masquerading as civilians. However, no passports were given to children under
10 or to the elderly (those aged 60 years and over). In a letter to Fukuda Tokuyasu of theJapanese Embassy, International Committee Chairman John Rabe wrote:
We understand that you registered 160,000 people without including children
under 10 years of age, and in some sections without including older women.
Therefore there are probably 250,000 to 300,000 civilians in the city.20

At the end of March 1938, Lewis Smythe conducted his own census, hiring a large
number of students to do the fieldwork. In a report entitled “War Damage in the Nanking
Area,” he writes:7

We venture an estimate of 250,000 to 270,000 in late March, some of whomwere inaccessible to the investigators, and some of whom were passed by;
221,000 are represented in the survey.21

Later on in the same document, Smythe refers to the population as of late May.
On May 31, the residents gathered in the five district offices of the municipal government(including Hsiakwan [Xiaguan], but apparently no other actions outside the gates) numbered
277,000.22

He also mentions that “noticeable inflow from less orderly areas near the city probably
built up a small surplus over departures … .”23
The population increase alone is proof that peace had been restored to Nanking.
In his war journal, Gen. Matsui wrote, “residents seem to be returning gradually.”24 But
according to Chinese accounts, some of them presented at the IMFTE, the “massacre” reached its
peak precisely one week after the Japanese occupation, when bands of Japanese soldiers shot
every Chinese who crossed their paths, raped every woman they encountered, looted, and burned.
Corpses were everywhere, mountains of them. Rivers of blood ran down the streets. If thoseaccounts are accurate, why did so many residents return to a city that had been transformed to ahell on earth?
In an interview, Nishizaka Ataru, a former member of the 36th Infantry regiment (the first unit toenter Nanking through Guanghua Gate), told this writer that his unit was ordered to march to
Shanghai. While travelling east on Jurong Road on December 23, Nishizaka encountered manygroups of refugees on their way back to Nanking.
The December 20, 1938 morning edition of the Asahi Shinbun devoted a half-page to a collectionof photographs entitled “Peace Returns to Nanking,” one of which was taken on December 18.
Captioned “A group of returning refugees escorted by the Imperial Army” (see pp. 118, 119) itshows a group of 200-300 refugees lined up waiting to reenter Nanking. Would they have been
so anxious to return during, or even after, a massacre?

POPULATION SHIFTS IN THE NANKING SAFETY ZONE
SourceDocuments of the Nanking Safety
Zone

The Good Man of Nanking:
The Diaries of John Rabe

1937
November 25

200,000+

p. 62

November 28

200,000p. 62

8

December 10
December 17

200,000

p. 17

December 18

200,000

pp. 18, 20

December 21

200,000

p. 48

December 25
December 27

200,000

p. 94

200,000

p. 143200,000

p. 57

January 14

250,000-300,000

p. 84

200,000

p. 184January 17

250,000

p. 87

250,000

p. 190January 18

250,000

p. 90

January 19

250,000

p. 90

January 22

250,000

p. 95

January 28

250,000

p. 112February 10

250,000

p. 164

1938

March

9

Chapter 4

The “Mountains Of Dead Bodies” That No One Saw
When he took the witness stand at the IMTFE, Red Swastika Society Vice-Chairman
Xu Chuanyin testified as follows.
The Japanese soldiers, when they entered the city — they were very very
rough, and they were very barbarious: They shoot at everyone in sight.
Anybody who runs away, or on the street, or hanging around somewhere,or peeking through the door, they shoot them — instant death.
I saw the dead bodies lying everywhere, and some of the bodies are very
badly mutilated. Some of dead bodies are lying there as they were, shot or
killed, some kneeling, some bending, some on their sides, and some justwith their legs and arms wide open. It shows that these been done by theJapanese, and I saw several Japanese were doing that at that very moment.
One main street I even started try to count the number of corpses lying on
both sides of the street, and I started to counting more than five hundred
myself. I say it was no use counting them; I can never do that.25

Jinling University Professor Miner Searle Bates, an American, also testified at the
IMTFE.
The bodies of civilians lay on the streets and alleys in the vicinity of myown house for many days after the Japanese entry.
Professor Smythe and I concluded, as a result of our investigations andobservations and checking of burials, that twelve thousand civilians, men,
women and children, were killed inside the walls within our own sureknowledge.26
Witness after witness described gruesome sights that they had seen in Nanking. There were“mountains of dead bodies” inside the city walls. Corpses filled not only Nanking’s main
roads, but also its lanes and alleys. “Knee-high rivers of blood flowed down the city’s
streets.” “Bodies were piled up on the streets, and automobiles drove over them.” The
Japanese shrank in horror as they listened to and read about these ghastly testimonies fordays on end. Every evening NHK Radio broadcast a program entitled “This Is the Truth,”which recounted inhumane, barbaric acts perpetrated by Japanese military personnel in themost lurid, sensational manner. Japan’s newspapers emulated this style in their coverage.

But not one of the tens of thousands of soldiers and some 150 newspaper
correspondents and photographers who followed them into Nanking ever saw
anything of the sort.
10

On December 15, 1937, two days after the Japanese occupied Nanking, Tokyo Nichinichi
Shinbun correspondents Wakaume and Murakami interviewed Bates at his home on the Jinling
University campus. The professor greeted his two visitors jovially, shook hands with them, andtold them that he was grateful to Japanese troops for their orderly entry into Nanking, and forhaving restored peace so expeditiously.27 Why Bates later made an about-face and testified that“the bodies of civilians lay on the streets and alleys in the vicinity of my own house for manydays after the Japanese entry” and that “twelve thousand civilians, men, women and children,were killed inside the walls” at the IMTFE we will never know. The reports Wakaume andMurakami dispatched to Japan mentioned nothing resembling Bates’ testimony. If, as Bates
asserted, there were indeed 12,000 corpses strewn about a city the size of Manhattan Island, theywould have filled every street, lane, and alley. The stench of decomposing bodies, which can bedetected within 100 meters, would have pervaded the city, nauseating its residents. It would havepermeated their clothing, and one laundering would not have removed it. Even when the corpses
had been taken away, the foul odor would have persisted for three or four days.
Sakamoto Chikashi, commander of the 2nd Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment (from Miyakonojo,
Miyazaki Prefecture), vividly recalls the situation in Nanking in December 1937.
At about 8:00 a.m. on December 13, we commenced our operation. Having
climbed over a section of a wall that had been breached, we were able to assemble
near the southwest corner of the city by about 10:30 a.m. (...) the main strength of
the Regiment advanced, moving along the city walls, to sweep Chinese stragglers.
My battalion headed north toward the eastern sector of Nanking. At about noon, I
noticed a restaurant on the left side of the road. It was open for business, and wesaw a man who appeared to be the owner inside. I and some of my men went inand enjoyed our first decent meal in a long time. We paid the owner in silver
coins, which made him very happy.
After resting for a bit, we marched on. At about 1430, we arrived at
Qingliangshan (also known as Wutaishan), where we confiscated six heavy guns.
We received orders to halt our advance, and bivouacked in the vicinity that night.
We didn’t inspect every single home, but other than the restaurant owner, we saw
no civilians, no enemy soldiers, no dead bodies. Nor did we hear any significant
gunfire.
According to an article in the Asahi Shinbun, Honda Katsuichi, in his book
Travels in China, wrote that more than 20,000 Chinese were massacred at
Wutaishan. However, as I stated earlier, all we did there was confiscate six guns.
The same article also states that on December 13, Japanese troops blockaded theroad to Xiaguan by closing Yijiang Gate, and shot a large number of fleeing
civilians to death. At that time, we were in Qingliangshan. From there to Yijiang
Gate, the distance is four or five kilometers, as the crow flies. If something likethat had happened, we would surely have heard the machine-gun fire.28

11

12

At daybreak on December 13, Chinese troops began to retreat en masse. The Japanese entered
Nanking from Zhongshan, Guanghua, Zhonghua, and Shuixi gates, and from Yijiang Gate at thenorthern end of the city. In the evening, each unit commenced its sweep of an assigned area (seemap on p. 23). The sweep reached its peak on December 14 and was, for the most part,completed by December 15. The Japanese soldiers, who had anticipated fierce combat, wereastonished and unsettled by the silence that reigned in Nanking, and by the fact that theyencountered no one there.
First Lt. Tsuchiya Shoji, commander of the 4th Company, 19th Infantry Regiment, entered
Nanking from Guanghua Gate. His recollections of the events of December 13 follow.
The walls had been destroyed by bombardment, but the homes inside werecompletely intact. Not even one roof tile had been displaced. However, an
atmosphere of eerie silence and desolation pervaded the city, and even mystalwart subordinates hesitated for a moment. In the midst of this ineffable silence,
one that I had never experienced before, I found myself, at some point, standing at
the head of my company.
As we proceeded further into the city, I sensed that Nanking was truly deserted.
No enemy bullets flew at us. We saw no one — only endless, silent rows ofhouses. After we had advanced several kilometers (I don’t remember how many)
we came upon a huge, reinforced concrete building. We were not at all prepared
for what we saw there.
When we entered what seemed to be an auditorium, we saw many nurses tending
to seriously wounded Chinese soldiers who couldn’t be evacuated. The nurses juststood there and stared at us. I bowed to them, and left the building. We had
resigned ourselves to a battle, but not a drop of blood was shed that day.29
Note that all these witnesses agree that Nanking was “eerily silent,” orderly, and completely
deserted.
The following is an excerpt from an interview this writer conducted with Tanida Isamu, former
10th Army staff officer.
On the morning of December 14, Headquarters personnel entered Nanking. In theafternoon, we established a base in a bank building near Nanking Road. By thattime, the city was already quiet. During the whole time I was stationed there, I
heard no gunfire whatsoever. That same day, I made a tour of Nanking, and took
photographs. I did see some corpses, but only a few. The city was peaceful.
As he spoke, Tanida showed me the photographs he had taken. He told me that there wereapproximately 1,000 bodies at the wharf in Xiaguan, which he believed to be those of Chinese
soldiers killed in action on December 13. I was amazed at the details he remembered. He also13mentioned that December 14 is his birthday, and how pleased he was to have the opportunity tocelebrate it in the company of Lt.-Gen. Yanagawa Heisuke, commander-in-chief of the 10th
Army, and how they toasted each other with cold sake.
In The Battle of Nanking, Vol. 6,30 former Asahi Shinbun correspondent Kondo states that “there
were corpses of both Chinese and Japanese military personnel outside Guanghua Gate, the resultof the bloody battle fought there. But I don’t recall there being a lot of them. I saw no deadcivilians.” Also, Futamura Jiro, a photographer who worked for Hochi Shinbun and later
Mainichi Shinbun, states, “Together with the 47th Infantry Regiment, I climbed over the wall
into the city, but I saw very few corpses there.”
We could cite any number of similar testimonies, but the point we wish to make is that no one
saw “mountains of dead bodies” or “rivers of blood.” No member of the Japanese military, noJapanese newspaper reporter, none of the 15 members of the International Committee, none of
the five foreign reporters on assignment in Nanking, no foreign national saw scenes remotely
resembling those described by Chinese witnesses who testified at the IMTFE.

14

Chapter 5

The International Committee’s Statistics on Crimes
Attributed to Japanese Military Personnel
Among the 69 documents included in Documents of the Nanking Safety Zone, which
describes the situation in Nanking following the Japanese occupation of that city, are reportsof crimes allegedly committed by Japanese military personnel between December 13, 1937
and February 9, 1938. Any examination of these cases must be preceded by an awareness ofthe following facts.
1. All 15 members of the International Committee, which issued the reports, were
foreign nationals (seven Americans, four Englishmen, three Germans, and one Dane).
At the time, the nations they represented were, for all intents and purposes, Japan’s
enemies, in that they resented and opposed Japanese encroachments on Chinese
territory and supported the Chinese military, both materially and spiritually. John
Rabe, the Committee’s chairman, was a citizen of Germany, a nation that was notfriendly toward Japan, the popular perception notwithstanding. The German
government supported the Chinese Nationalists, and supplied a team of militaryadvisors headed by Gen. Alexander von Falkenhausen, which trained the ChineseArmy. Rabe was president of Siemens’ Far Eastern operations. During his assignment
in China, he sold massive amounts of German-made weaponry to the Nationalist
government.
2. Most of the crime reports prepared by Committee members were based on hearsay orrumors (see table at the end of this chapter).
3. The Committee monitored crimes committed by Japanese troops both in the Safety
Zone and in other parts of Nanking.
4. Serving as the Committee’s informants were the Red Swastika Society, the YMCA,
and a spy network of Chinese youths, a special detachment of the Nationalist
government’s Anti-Japanese Propaganda Bureau.31
Spies went to the International Committee’s office at 5 Ninghai Road to deliver their reports,
which were then typed up by one of the Committee members and hand-delivered to theJapanese Embassy or other foreign legations. These reports were issued on a daily basis (insome cases, twice daily). In addition to letters accusing Japanese soldiers of crimes, theJapanese Embassy received requests for food and improved public safety. Additionally,
several Committee members shared a residence, which served both as an information center
where spies were received and as a conference site where demands and reports were drafted.
Members made no attempt to investigate reports of Japanese crimes — they simply accepted
all of them as fact and recorded them.

15

The Committee’s liaison at the Japanese Embassy was Fukuda Tokuyasu. At the time, Fukuda
was a junior foreign service officer. After his return to Japan, he was appointed private secretary
to Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru. He then embarked on a political career, serving first inJapan’s Diet, and later as defense minister, director-general of the Administrative Management
Agency, and then as posts and telecommunications minister. A gifted politician, Fukuda earned
the respect and admiration of his compatriots. He was also a close friend of this writer, withwhom he shared recollections of his service in Nanking.
My duties included visiting the office of the International Committee, an organization
formed by foreign nationals, nearly every day. There was much coming and going ofChinese youths, who were reporting incidents. Usually, what they had to say wassomething like the following: “Japanese soldiers are gang-raping 15 or 16 girls on X
Street right now” or “A band of Japanese soldiers has broken into a house on Taiping
Street, and is now burglarizing it.” Whichever Committee member or members wasavailable (Rev. Magee, and Mr. Fitch, for instance) would proceed to type up the reports
right in front of my eyes.
I voiced my objections to these reports any number of times: “Just a moment — you can’t
submit a protest without verifying this incident.” Sometimes I would insist that
Committee members accompany me to the site where the rape or looting had supposedly
taken place. When we arrived there, we never found evidence of a crime’s having beencommitted. None of these places was even occupied.
One morning, the embassy received a complaint from the American vice-consul: He had
been told that Japanese soldiers were stealing lumber from an American-owned
warehouse in Xiaguan and loading it onto a truck. I was ordered to go to Xiaguan
immediately and stop them. I telephoned Headquarters and asked Staff Officer Hongo
Tadao to accompany me there. Together with the vice-consul, we rushed to Xiaguan in
the middle of a snowstorm. It must have been about 9:00 in the morning. When wearrived, there wasn’t a soul there. The warehouse was locked. Nothing had been stolen. I
scolded the vice-consul for making such a fuss over nothing. We received false alarms
like that almost every day.
I am convinced that most of the reports that appear in Timperley’s Japanese Terror in
China32 were typed by Fitch or Magee and sent to Shanghai without anyone’s having
inspected the alleged crime scene.

In the 69 letters written by the International Committee are accounts of 444 crimes allegedly
perpetrated by Japanese military personnel. Accounts of only 398 cases were published inDocuments of the Nanking Safety Zone, most likely because Committee members had decided
that the remaining 46 cases were particularly unconvincing.
In Nanking, Fukuda examined protests issued by Chinese citizens and the International
Committee with care. He knew that most of them were completely without merit. Nevertheless,the stream of protests from the International Committee against Japanese acts of violence
alarmed the East Asian Bureau of the Foreign Ministry. Ishii Itaro, then head of the Bureau,
describes the reaction at the Ministry in his memoirs. The following excerpt is from a diary entry
dated January 6, 1938.
16

We received letters from Shanghai detailing unspeakable acts of violence, including
looting and rapes, committed in Nanking by our soldiers. The perpetrators of these crimes
have disgraced the Imperial Army and betrayed the Japanese people. This is a matter withgrave social implications. (...) How could men fighting in the name of our Emperor
behave in such a way? From that time on, I referred to those incidents as the “Nanking
atrocities.”33

Japanese proponents of the massacre argument make liberal use of this passage, but they do so
without a proper understanding of Ishii’s reasons for believing the unfounded protests or of his
animosity toward the military. At a liaison conference held at the Headquarters of the General
Staff in Tokyo on December 14, 1938 (one day after the occupation of Nanking), an angry Ishii
lashed out at military officials.
At this point, who cares about the proposal outlining conditions for peace? Japan should
go as far as it can go. When it reaches an impasse, it will be forced to see the light.34
I experienced a perverse pleasure upon uttering those rebellious words.35

The “Nanking atrocities” had provided Ishii with the perfect opportunity to strike back at
military authorities. His hatred of them may have stemmed from personal feelings of hostility
toward his own nation. For instance, every time he mentions relations between Japan and China
in his memoirs, he writes “China” first, contrary to the conventional method, an indication that
his sympathies lay with China. Furthermore, when he was decorated by the Emperor, he wrotethat he “wasn’t at all pleased.”36 However, when he received a similar award from China, he
expressed delight at having been so honored.37 We find it ironic that a person harboring suchsentiments was chief of the Foreign Ministry’s East Asian Bureau.
We have digressed a bit, but we felt it was important to include this information, since
Hitotsubashi University professor Fujiwara Akira, in his recent book,38 cites Ishii’s memoirs as
irrefutable proof that a massacre was perpetrated in Nanking.
As Fukuda Tokuyasu has revealed, though the majority of the 398 “cases of disorder by Japanesesoldiers in the Safety Zone” protested by the International Committee had no basis in fact, every
one of them was accepted, documented, and reported to the Japanese Embassy. Tomizawa
Shigenobu, an independent researcher, has made a computer analysis of these cases, whichappears in table form at the end of this chapter.
There were 516 cases in all, not 398, since some of them include accounts of two incidents.
Among them are 27 murder cases (54 victims). In only two cases are the names of the victims
specified, and there were eyewitnesses to only one case. Two hundred thousand people werecrowded into the Safety Zone, which encompassed an area the size of New York’s Central Parkbut, incredibly, only one murder caught the attention of the Zone’s residents. Since theInternational Committee accepted any and all rumors, 27 murder cases were recorded andprotested, despite the absence of specifics or witnesses. Where did a massacre of any extent takeplace?
17

Thus were the accounts of all acts of misconduct occurring between December 13, 1937 andFebruary 9, 1938, for which Japanese military personnel were allegedly responsible, documented
by the International Committee, all of whose members harbored malice toward Japan.

18

STATISTICAL SUMMARY OF INCIDENTS REPORTED IN DOCUMENTS OF THE NANKING SAFETY ZONE
Total numberof incidents

Incidents
occurring atnight*

Incidents
occurring
during the day

27

7

20

Murders(Number ofvictims)

(54)

Rapes
(Number ofvictims)

(42)

175
(375)

Abductions(Number ofvictims)

(12)
46
(187)
43

(370)

129

13

Reports that do
not include
victims’ names

Reports that
includevictims
names

Cases forwhich therewereeyewitnesses

14

12

2

1

(36)
75

(83)
30

(336)

Reports signed
by aCommittee
member
6

(6)

(188)

(34)

Reports not
signed by aCommittee
member

(34)
54

(105)
5

(6)

(2)
51

(102)
25

(330)

(1)
3

7

7

2

(3)
18

(320)

(10)

Looting

131

19

112

57

55

8

47

5

Arson

5

2

3

2

1

0

1

0

Bodily injury

37

11

26

10

16

14

2

0

(Number ofvictims)

(43)

(15)

(28)

(12)

(16)

(14)

(2)

Trespassing

25

7

18

6

12

0

12

7

Others

73

16

57

44

13

5

8

4

TOTALS

516

121

395

205

190

108

82

26

19

Source: Tomizawa Shigenobu, Nankin jiken no tokeiteki kenkyu (Statistical Research on the Nanking Incident) (Tokyo, July 2000,
photocopy).
* Japanese soldiers were not permitted to leave their barracks at night. Anyone who defied this order was severely punished.
Furthermore, throughout the month of December, the electric power plant in Nanking was not functioning, so there was noelectricity. At night, it was pitch dark in the city, and all who ventured out were courting danger.
Battalion commander Guo Qi, who went into hiding in the Safety Zone, later wrote a book about his experiences there, whichcontains the following passage: “The enemy soldiers were too cowardly to come out at night. Except for sentries who guarded
their barracks, they were nowhere to be seen. We thus had ample opportunity to proceed with our own activities.”39 Judging fromthis account, it is extremely likely that crimes committed at night were the work of Chinese troops.

20Chapter 6

Japanese Quickly Restoring Order in the Safety Zone
A.

No Women or Children Killed by the Japanese

All of Nanking’s civilian residents, including women and children, had taken refuge in the Safety
Zone, which was administered by the International Committee.
The Japanese occupied Nanking on December 13. The 7th Infantry Regiment from Kanazawa,
commanded by Col. Isa Kazuo, was entrusted with the sweep of the Safety Zone. On December
14, Col. Isa stationed sentries at 10 locations near the entrances and exits of the Safety Zone,
who were ordered to prevent anyone from entering or leaving the Zone without good reason. At
the Tokyo Trials, Col. Wakizaka Jiro, commander of the 36th Infantry Regiment, testified thatwhen he attempted to enter the Safety Zone, a sentry refused to allow him to pass.40 The fact thateven a high-ranking officer was denied entry is evidence of how meticulously orders were
followed.
As a result of strict orders issued by Commander-in-Chief Matsui, not one shell was fired into
the Safety Zone, nor were aerial bombs dropped on it. No acts of arson were committed — infact, there were no fires at all in the Zone. The Safety Zone was, as its name implies, safe. Rapes,
assaults, thefts, and other crimes committed by a few renegade Japanese soldiers are described inrecords kept by the International Committee.41 But no women or children were murdered, nor are
there any records of such crimes. Furthermore, burial records prepared by the Red Swastika
Society list virtually no women or children. It is possible that a few civilians were drafted toserve as laborers, or mistakenly apprehended during the hunt for Chinese military personnel
masquerading as civilians. However, contemporaneous records describe the Safety Zone as, forthe most part, a peaceful and quiet place. Since the Safety Zone was peaceful, every citizen of
Nanking were safe since, with a few exceptions, all civilians had congregated there.42
John H.D. Rabe, chairman of the International Committee, sent a letter containing the following
language to the Japanese military authorities on behalf of the entire Committee.
We come to thank you for the fine way your artillery spared the Safety Zone andto establish contact with you for future plans for care of Chinese civilians in theZone.43
The following are excerpts from a diary and notes kept by Dr. James McCallum, a physician
associated with the Jinling University Hospital, which were read at the Tokyo Trials by Ito
Kiyoshi, Gen. Matsui Iwane’s attorney, during the presentation of Matsui’s defense, andwhich describe acts of kindness performed by Japanese soldiers.
We have had some very pleasant Japanese who have treated us with courtesy andrespect (December 29, 1937).
21

Occasionally have I seen a Japanese helping some Chinese, or picking up a
Chinese baby to play with it (December 29, 1937).
Today I saw crowds of people flocking across Chung Shan [Zhongshan] Road outof the Zone. They came back later carrying rice which was being distributed by
the Japanese from the Executive Yuan Examination Yuan (December 31, 1937).
Succeeded in getting half of the hospital staff registered today. I must report agood deed done by some Japanese. Recently several very nice Japanese havevisited the hospital. We told them of our lack of food supplies for the patients.
Today they brought in 100 shing [jin (equivalent to six kilograms)] of beans alongwith some beef. We have had no meat at the hospital for a month and these gifts
were mighty welcome. They asked what else we would like to have (January 3,1938).44
In War Damage in the Nanking Area, Lewis Smythe wrote:
The fact that practically no burning occurred within the zone was a further
advantage.45
The late Maeda Yuji, former correspondent for Domei Tsushin46 and former director of theJapan Press Center, described his recollections of his assignment in Nanking in Japan andthe World.
Those who claim that a massacre took place in Nanking, leaving aside theiraccusations that 200,000-300,000 persons were murdered for the moment, assertthat most victims were women and children. However, these supposed victims
were, without exception, in the Safety Zone, protected by the Japanese Security
Headquarters. The Nanking Bureau of my former employer, Domei Tsushin, wassituated inside the Safety Zone. Four days after the occupation, all of us moved to
the Bureau, which served both as our lodgings and workplace. Shops had already
reopened, and life had returned to normal. We were privy to anything andeverything that happened in the Safety Zone. No massacre claiming tens of
thousands, or thousands, or even hundreds of victims could have taken place there
without our knowing about it, so I can state with certitude that none occurred.
Prisoners of war were executed, some perhaps cruelly, but those executions wereacts of war and must be judged from that perspective. There were no massmurders of noncombatants. I cannot remain silent when an event that neveroccurred is recognized as fact, and is described as such in our textbooks. Why was
historical fact so horribly distorted? I believe that the answer to this question canbe found in the postwar historical view, for which the Tokyo Trials are
responsible.47
22

Accounts of the Nanking Incident in Japanese textbooks contain wording like “Japanese military
personnel killed 70,000-90,000 persons, if one counts only civilians, including women andchildren” and “Japanese soldiers murdered a huge number of civilians, including women andchildren.” Every history textbook mentions that women and children were murdered in Nanking,but what is the basis for these claims? Even citizens of other nations that harbored hostility
toward Japan expressed gratitude to Japanese soldiers for maintaining order in the Safety Zone
and for acts of kindness. This writer is unable to understand why Japanese textbooks containaccounts that distort the facts, and encourage our children to despise their motherland and theirforebears.

B.

A Letter of Gratitude From Another Refugee Zone

At this time, we would like to recount a story that concerns another refugee zone. About 1.8
kilometers north of Xiaguan, where bloody battles that claimed thousands of lives were fought, isthe town of Baotaqiao. Six or seven thousand refugees had congregated in Baoguosi, a temple
located in that town. On December 13, the 11th Squadron, led by the flagship Ataka(commanded by Maj.-Gen. Kondo Eijiro), was sailing down the Yangtze. The fleet encounteredheavy fire from a Chinese position at Liuzizhang, but finally broke through the blockade andheaded toward Xiaguan. Hozu and Seta made up the advance guard, followed by Kawakaze,
Suzukaze, Hira, Ataka and other warships. The Yangtze and its banks were crowded with boats
and rafts carrying fleeing enemy soldiers, on which the Japanese warships launched a fierce
attack. On December 14, the gunboat Hira anchored at Zhongxing wharf, one nautical mile
downstream from Xiaguan, and Lt.-Col. Doi decided to reconnoiter Baotaqiao. A munitions
depot was located there, as well as a railroad siding, weapons, provisions, uniforms and othermilitary supplies. Trenches had been dug all around the town, from which stragglers would often
emerge, terrorizing the residents. Baotaqiao had become an extremely dangerous, lawless place.
Lt.-Col. Doi Shinji, commander of the Hira voluntarily took on the responsibility of restoring
peace and stability to Baotaqiao and its outskirts, whose 20,000 residents and several thousand
refugees were living in fear.
First, Doi repaired the bridge to Xiaguan. Then he set about distributing food, clothing, and othernecessities to the beleaguered residents. He changed the name of the town to “Pinghejie” (Townof Peace), and with his men, protected the townspeople from marauding Chinese stragglers. Doiquickly restored order, but the most urgent problem, the lack of food, persisted.
At the end of the year, the lead ship in a minesweeping operation struck a mine at the
Wulongshan Fort blockade and sank. Doi, ordered to participate in the rescue effort, boarded theHira and sped to the disaster site. When the rescue work had been completed, the Hira sailed to
Shanghai, carrying a large number of dead and wounded sailors.
Lt.-Col. Doi visited Fleet Headquarters on the Izumo, then at anchor in Shanghai, and describedthe desperate situation in Hepingjie. Headquarters staff, moved by Doi’s earnestness andsincerity, approved his petition for relief provisions. Food for the refugees was loaded onto theHira and transported to the Zhongxing wharf. The ship arrived on New Year’s Day in 1938.
23

Chen Hansen, chairman of the local branch of the Red Swastika Society, a charitableorganization, accepted the provisions, described below, on behalf of the refugees.
10 crates of preserved beef and pork
10 large bags of refined sugar
10 crates of dried fish
10 crates of soybean oil
10 packages of table salt
20 crates of dried rice cakes
To welcome the Hira, the refugees set off firecrackers; each house sported a Japanese flag. Not
only the refugees, but all the townspeople cheered when the ship arrived. A banner reading“Hepingjie, Xiaguan, Nanking” had been put up at the town’s entrance, and a joyful mood
prevailed.
On the following day, the town’s officials put on their best clothes and lined up at Baguo Temple
to receive Lt.-Col. Doi and his crew. Chen Hansen presented them with a receipt and a letter ofgratitude.

C.

Funeral Services for Fallen Enemy Soldiers

On the night of December 13, the Wakizaka Unit (36th Infantry Regiment), the first to enter
Nanking, cremated the remains of Japanese soldiers killed in action. Its members then erected atall wooden tablet with a prayer inscribed on it in honor of the enemy dead, at which they offeredflowers and incense. They buried the Chinese soldiers with respect, and chanted sutras for therepose of their souls all through the night.
The point we wish to make here is that there was nothing remarkable about the good deeds
performed by Lt.-Col. Doi or Col. Wakizaka. They were simply demonstrating compassion,
which was an integral aspect of bushido, the traditional code of conduct of the Japanese warrior.
In fact, Staff Officer Yoshikawa Takeshi was severely reprimanded by Gen. Matsui, whoclaimed that the Chinese war dead were not handled with sufficient care. Could soldiers andcommanders of this caliber have killed innocent women and children indiscriminately?
The Chinese have claimed that several tens of thousands of persons were massacred at Meitan
Harbor and on the property of the Heji Company. However, Commander Doi steadfastly denies
such claims, having never heard even rumors of such slaughter. From his testimony alone,
readers should realize that this claim was preposterous Chinese propaganda.

24

January 02, 1938
To the Captain of the Hira:I hereby confirm receipt of the following:
Preserved beef and pork:
Refined sugar:
Dried fish:
Soybean oil:
Table salt:
Dried rice cakes:

10 crates
10 large bags
10 crates
10 crates
10 packages
20 crates

The provisions delivered by the Captain are sorely needed by the refugees, and aremuch appreciated.
Words cannot express my gratitude to the Captain for his kindness and generosity.
Chen Hansen
Chairman, Hepingjie World Red Swastika Society
Refugee Center
Baotaqiao Branch, Xiaguan District
WORLD RED SWASTIKA SOCIETY

25

Chapter 7

The Fabricated Reports of Mass Murders of Prisoners of War Were
A. Many Prisoners Released on the Spot
The most disputed aspect of the Japanese invasion of Nanking is the killing of prisoners ofwar. When, during a heated battle, a soldier sees his comrades fall, one by one, and realizes
that defeat is imminent, he may decide that he does not wish to share their fate. He may
throw down his weapon, raise his arms in surrender, and demand to be treated as a prisonerof war. However, there is no guarantee that his enemy will oblige.
We know from examining officers’ war journals that some of them issued orders to killinsubordinate prisoners, but that is to be expected in a conflict, as is the shooting of fleeing
stragglers. According to the Rules Respecting Laws and Customs of War on Land, decisions as towhether prisoners of war are to be taken during a conflict rest with the commanding officer.

During a battle, a life-and-death situation, commanders must make expeditious decisions,based on their instincts and training. They do not have time to contemplate the possibility
that they may be violating international law.
A Study of Combat Methods Used Against Chinese Troops, published by the Infantry School in 1933,
contains a section entitled “Disposition of Prisoners of War.” Fujiwara Akira’s interpretation of thematerial in this section is that Japanese military authorities instructed their subordinates to refrainfrom executing Russian or German prisoners of war, but did not discourage the execution of Chinese
prisoners.48 Fujiwara has misunderstood the text, which follows.
In keeping with our policy toward prisoners of war of all nationalities, it is not absolutely
necessary to remand or incarcerate Chinese prisoners of war while waiting to see how the war
situation develops. With the exception of special cases, prisoners of war may be released where
they were captured, or after having been moved to another location. [Italics supplied.]49

Nothing here states (or even implies) that it is acceptable to kill Chinese prisoners of war. It is likelythat “special cases” refers to Chinese soldiers disguised as civilians. Chinese military personnel,
unlike their German or Russian counterparts, commonly masqueraded as civilians and engaged inguerrilla warfare, even after their units had surrendered. The execution of such soldiers is not a
violation of international law.
Any debate concerning Chinese troops disguised as civilians requires a knowledge of theRegulations Annexed to the Hague Convention Concerning the Laws and Customs of War on
Land (1907). According to the Regulations, soldiers wearing civilian clothing do not meet thequalifications of belligerents, which are as follows.

26

Article 1. The laws, rights, and duties of war apply not only to armies, but also to militia andvolunteer corps fulfilling the following conditions:
1. To be commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates;
2. To have a fixed distinctive emblem recognizable at a distance;
3. To carry arms openly; and4. To conduct their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.50

Therefore, individual soldiers (or a group of soldiers) masquerading as civilians cannot beviewed as belligerents. Dr. Shinobu Junpei, Japan’s foremost authority on international law,writes:In the event that a party who fails to meet the qualifications of a belligerent
engages in hostile conduct, international law dictates that that party be charged
with a grave breach of international law, punishable by execution or a lengthy
prison sentence.51

Legal scholar Tabata Shigejiro concurs.
Those who fail to qualify as belligerents do not have the right to be treated as
prisoners of war when captured by the enemy. They are guilty of grave
breaches of international law, and must be punished accordingly.52

Those who have embraced the “massacre” argument castigate Japanese military personnel for
executing Chinese soldiers masquerading as civilians and carrying concealed weapons, without
benefit of trial. Perhaps they are unaware of the many, many instances in which Japanesesoldiers were caught off guard and killed by those “civilians.” In any case, the gist of theaforementioned section of the Infantry School document is: With the exception of those special
cases, prisoners of war may be released.
It is true that, at that time, neither commanding officers nor the rank-and-file were conversant
with international law. Therefore, when faced with large numbers of prisoners of war in Nanking,they were at a loss as to how to accommodate them and, in some cases, they made bad decisions.
Such tragedies occur in all wars. To cite an example from the Western world, the portion ofWorld War II fought in the European theater ended on May 8, 1945 when the Germans
surrendered. Soon thereafter, 175,000 German soldiers were taken prisoner in Yugoslavia. Whilecrossing the Alps, more than 80,000 of them were slaughtered en masse by Yugoslavian troops.
Only about half of them were placed in detention camps. According to The Prisoners: The Livesand Survival of German Soldiers Behind Barbed Wire, written by Paul Carell and Günter
Böddecker,53 many other, similar incidents took place.

27

Hora Tomio conjectures that Lt.-Gen. Nakajima Kesago, commander of the 16th Division,ordered the mass execution of prisoners of war because the latter wrote “our policy is, inprinciple, to take no prisoners” in his diary.54 Others, too, have misunderstood this passage andargued that Chinese prisoners taken in Nanking were systematically slaughtered, but that was not
at all the case.
Onishi Hajime, former staff officer of the Shanghai Expeditionary Force, provided the following
explanation about policy relating to prisoners of war.
By “take no prisoners” Lt.-Gen. Nakajima meant that prisoners of war were to be disarmed andreleased. Chinese troops had been conscripted from all over China, but it was their country, andthey could find their way home.55

Onishi added that no Division order (or any other type of order, for that matter) instructing that
prisoners of war be killed was ever issued. Two detention camps were established in Nanking,housing a total of about 10,000 prisoners. Additionally, there was a small facility at Jiangdong
Gate where model prisoners were detained, and two other detention camps. According to former
Staff Officer Sakakibara Kazue, who was entrusted with the supervision of the prisoners, “I
received orders to move half of the 4,000 prisoners held at the Central Prison Camp to the campin Shanghai. I made the decisions about who would be moved.” At the IMTFE, Sakakibara
testified that “some of the prisoners were assigned to each unit as laborers. Many escaped, but
we didn’t try to stop them.”56
When a new government (later headed by Wang Jingwei) was established in Nanking, moreprisoners were released and reconscripted. Liang Hongzhi, who was instrumental in forming thatgovernment, and who served as head of its executive branch, was eventually tried and executedfor having collaborated with the Japanese. At his trial, he made the following statement.
The Pacification Forces [appellation given to the new government’s armed forces] were
established in the spring of 1939. The majority of our soldiers were conscripted from the ranksof the prisoners. There were only a few enlistees. We formed four divisions, each consisting of
only two or three thousand men.57

In other words, the vast majority of men who comprised the approximately 10,000-man
Pacification Forces were conscripted from the prisoner-of-war population of soldiers who hadsurrendered in Nanking or Wuhan. Liu Qixiong, who later served as head of the New Democracy
Society’s Supervisory Department, was once a prisoner of war in Nanking.
We shall now describe two cases in which prisoners were released where they were captured.
The first involved the 20th Infantry Regiment (from Fukuchiyama), attached to the 16th Divisionand commanded by Maj.-Gen. Ono Nobuaki. Kinugawa Takeichi, a former member of the 1stCompany of that Regiment sent a letter describing the particulars. An excerpt follows.
We handled about 2,000 prisoners. Those who promised not to oppose or resist the Japanese
were sent on their way after having been given a small amount of food and white flags. By the28end of the year [1937], we had released about half of them. We put the other half to work: We
had them wear armbands, and assigned them to transport food supplies and to prepare meals.
Burlap sacks of brown rice found in a trench inside Zhongshan Gate were a godsend to our unit,
but we were short of water and fuel. The prisoners were a great help in that respect. They
worked all day long preparing food. I was in charge of them. They called me “Mr. Yi Chuan”[the Chinese pronunciation of Kinugawa], and as time passed, I became very fond of them. I
never could have killed them. When we moved on to another area, we set all of them free.

The second instance involved the 45th Infantry Regiment (from Kagoshima), commanded byTakeshita Yoshiyasu. Approximately 5,000 Chinese soldiers waving white flags surrendered to
the Regiment’s 2nd Company at Xiaguan on the morning of December 14. From them the 2ndCompany confiscated 30 cannons, as well as heavy machine guns, rifles, a huge amount of
ammunition, and 10 horses. Honda Katsuichi describes the release of these prisoners as follows.
A great number of Nationalist soldiers, including Private 2nd Class Liu, reversed the position of
their caps (with the visors at the back) and surrendered. There were several thousand of them.
Once they had been assembled in one location, a Japanese soldier who appeared to be incommand rode up on a horse. He had a full beard, three or four centimeters long. He gave
instructions in Japanese, which Liu didn’t understand. Through an interpreter, he learned thatthe officer had said, “You people are farmers. I’m going to release you. Make sure you gostraight home.”
The Chinese soldiers were instructed to make flags out of whatever white material they could
find. Private Liu took his handkerchief and tied it to a branch. The riverbank was strewn withclothing and household goods discarded by local residents. Liu replaced his uniform with someof the cast-off clothing.
Once the several thousand Chinese prisoners had been freed, they set out for their homevillages, carrying their white flags.58

B. Fourteen Thousand Prisoners Taken at Mufushan
The 65th Infantry Regiment (from Aizu Wakamatsu) under the command of Col. Morozumi
Gyosaku, and attached to the 13th Division (commanded by Maj.-Gen. Yamada Senji), took thelargest number (14,700) of prisoners, on December 14 near Mufushan.
To learn the truth about how these prisoners were treated, writer Suzuki Akira travelled to Sendai
in 1962 to interview former Maj.-Gen. Yamada and other men who were at Mufushan. His reporton those interviews, which we shall summarize here, appears in The Illusion of a Great Nanking
Massacre. Maj.-Gen. Yamada thought long and hard, trying to arrive at an equitable decision
regarding the treatment of the prisoners. He finally decided to transport them to an island in the
Yangtze River and release them. However, when they had neared their destination, a riot brokeout during which about 1,000 prisoners were shot to death. There were Japanese casualties aswell.59 The Fukushima Min’yu Shinbun, carried a series of articles about the incident, which29

included the testimonies of many Japanese soldiers who were involved in the incident, under thetitle “Army Campaigns During the Second Sino-Japanese War.” The series was later reprinted ina Self-Defense Forces publication.60
In its August 7, 1984 edition, the Mainichi Shinbun printed an article with a banner headline
reading: “Former Army Corporal Describes the Massacre of More Than 10,000 Prisoners Taken
in Nanking.” The article relates the story of a Mr. K., a former corporal in the 65th Regiment,
who marched 13,500 prisoners to the banks of the Yangtze and killed all of them. This was amajor news story, since it claimed that the executions were planned and systematic, contradicting
the previously held perception to the contrary.
Soon after the newspaper article appeared, Honda Katsuichi visited Mr. K., interviewed him, andwrote a two-part article, which ran in two successive issues of the monthly Asahi Journal.61
Honda’s articles, which contained more detail, asserted that the executions of 13,500 prisoners
had been ordered by Shanghai Expeditionary Force Headquarters.
Mr. K. is, in actuality, Kurihara Riichi, a resident of Tokyo. He sent a protest to the Mainichi
Shinbun, in which he stated that he had agreed to an interview because he wished to refute thecharge made in Testimonies: The Great Nanking Massacre (supposedly official records)
published in China, i.e., that Japanese troops had massacred 300,000-400,000 Chinese. However,the newspaper’s reporter had both quoted Mr. Kurihara out of context and attributed statements
to him that he had never made. Even though the Mainichi Shinbun didn’t print his name, Mr.
Kurihara felt that he had been slandered and exploited.
On September 27, in a tiny article with the headline “The Eyes of a Reporter,” the Mainichi
Shinbun summarized Mr. Kurihara’s protest. However, the gist of the article was that thecriticism that had been heaped on “Mr. K.” was shameful. The newspaper offered no apology
whatsoever for its reporter’s misdeeds.
When I telephoned Mr. Kurihara to learn what he had really said, he responded: “Both theMainichi Shinbun and Honda omitted the points I wished to make. Instead, the accounts theywrote were diametrically opposite what I had told them. I regret having spoken to either ofthem.”
I telephoned him again, but he wouldn’t agree to an interview. I decided to fly to Fukushima andmeet with Hirabayashi Sadaharu, former sublieutenant and commander of an artillery platoon
attached to the 65th Regiment. Since Suzuki Akira’s interview with Mr. Hirabayashi appears in
the aforementioned The Illusion of a Great Nanking Massacre, we will print only the highlightsof what the latter told us.
1. Many of my men were killed or wounded in the conflict at Shanghai. I was left with
only one-third of the forces I had started out with — fewer than 1,500 men. To makematters worse, we were all exhausted. When we were confronted with prisoners of war
who outnumbered us nearly 10 to one, we didn’t know how we were going to manage tofeed them. The first thing we did was to embark on a frantic search for utensils.

30

2. We constructed a bamboo fence around a school building at Shangyuan Gate, within
which the prisoners were confined. The leaderless, weary prisoners were dressed inmotley attire. Upon orders from Brigade Commander Yamada, we released persons who
appeared to be noncombatants — about half of the prisoners.
3. A fire broke out on the evening of the second day. In the midst of the ensuing chaos,half the remaining prisoners escaped. Inwardly, I was relieved, but the fear of acounterattack was always in the back of my mind.
4. We used the black gaiters worn by the prisoners to bind them. They weren’t very
effective. By then, there were about 4,000 prisoners, but fewer than 1,000 men to guard
them. Ours was an artillery unit, so my men didn’t have rifles, only swords. We set out inthe afternoon in a line of men four kilometers long. I was at the rear.
5.A riot erupted at dusk. The sound of gunfire was followed by a commotion at the headof the line that sounded like a combination of shrieking and screaming.
6.The disturbance soon spread to the rear of the line. As machine-gun fire reverberated,
the prisoners scattered. With only swords to defend ourselves, we were very lucky toescape with our lives.
7.Calm had been restored by about 5:30 p.m., when we were visited by a mild squall.
Then the clouds parted revealing a bright moon, which illuminated the corpses on the
ground — a ghastly scene that continues to haunt me.
8.At the Officers’ Mess the next morning, I learned that an officer had been stabbed todeath with his own sword, which a prisoner had wrested away from him. A dozen or
more of my men were wounded, some seriously.
9.On the following day, all prisoners were ordered to bury the dead. As I recall, the work
was finished in half a day. I heard that between 1,000 and 3,00062 prisoners were killed.
Many of the Chinese hid in the reeds, but we didn’t attempt to apprehend them, and we
certainly did not shoot them. If escape hadn’t been the prisoners’ main objective, many
more of my men would have been killed.

The March 1985 issue of Zenbo contains the transcript of an interview with Mr. Kurihara, which
is virtually identical to Mr. Hirabayashi’s testimony. During the interview, Kurihara said, “WhenI read the article in the Mainichi Shinbun, I was astounded. They put words in my mouth. I told
them my story because I wanted to protest the claim that 300,000 Chinese were massacred, butthey made it seem as though I support that claim.” About Honda, he commented: “All he does isrepeat lies the Chinese told him. I don’t think he’s in his right mind. I don’t know why hebothered to interview me, because he made the whole thing up. I was betrayed.”
Mr. Kurihara repeatedly expressed his anger at the Mainichi Shinbun reporter and Honda
Katsuichi for misrepresenting him. For instance, he told them that he was in the process of31

transporting the prisoners to the opposite bank of the Yangtze, where they were to be released.
However, in their version of his story, he was the mastermind of a massacre.
The media are often referred to as the fourth estate, because of the power they wield. When amajor newspaper runs a sensational article and its editors realize they’ve made a mistake, they
may print a retraction, but the damage has already been done. The fact that they slandered Mr.
Kurihara by insinuating that he orchestrated the massacre of 13,000 prisoners was bad enough.63
But far more reprehensible was their abuse of the freedom of speech, for the very reason that
their influence on society is so profound. Irresponsible reporting distorts the perception of history,
and insults and disgraces the Japanese people. One cannot help but wonder why these journalists
are so intent on publicizing a massacre that never occurred, disseminating lies that bring shameon Japan, and collaborating in Chinese propaganda campaigns.

32

Chapter 8

The Manufactured Chongshantang Burial Records
A. Lies Exposed by Official Chinese Documents
In November 1945 the Chinese Nationalist government launched a citywide drive in Nanking. Its
purpose was to collect reference material that would support the IMTFE’s case against Lt.-Gen.
Nagatani Sumio (former commander of the 6th Division), and thus hasten his execution. A
committee was formed bearing the imposing name of “Committee for the Investigation ofJapanese War Crimes Committed in Nanking:Procurator of the District Court, Nanking.”
The members of the Committee represented both government and private organizations,
including the Central Bureau of Military Affairs Committee, the Statistics Bureau, the Nanking
Police Agency, the Lawyers’ Association, the Physicians’ Association, the Chamber ofCommerce, the Red Swastika Society, and the Self-Government Committee, but not
Chongshantang (a small charitable organization).
But the Committee’s initial appeal to Nanking’s population to come forward and attest to amassacre or other Japanese atrocities was fruitless. The residents “would give out noinformation.”64 The Committee accelerated its efforts to recruit witnesses, conducting
investigations “with utmost care, by means of various interviews and inquiries.”65 The result was
the “Summary Report on the Investigation of Japanese War Crimes Committed in Nanking,” anexcerpt from which follows.
Just about the time of the fall of NANKING, our troops and citizens, numbering
2000-3000, were swept by enemy fire in the vicinity of YUHUATAI before they
could retreat. Sad wailing was heard everywhere; the ground was strewn withcorpses and blood ran knee-deep. Meanwhile our troops and citizens attempting toescape by crossing the YANTZE [sic] River from the vicinity of PA-KUA-CHOU[Baguazhou] were swept by enemy fire. Many corpses floated on the water, dyed
red with blood.66
This passage, however eloquent, does not constitute proof that more than 300,000 persons weremassacred, and what it describes is a war situation, not a massacre.
The report also contains accounts of sexual assaults.
For amusement, a father was forced to assault his daughter. In another case, a boy
was forced to assault his sister. An old man was forced to assault his son’s wife.
Breasts were torn off, and women were stabbed in the bosoms. Chins weresmashed, and teeth knocked out. Such hideous scenes are unbearable to watch.67
33

It is possible that the Chinese derive pleasure from such assaults (they often lace their argumentswith insults containing references to incestual sex), but that is certainly not true of the Japanese,
who have never found such acts amusing.
In any case, the Nationalist government submitted this hastily cobbled “survey report” to the
IMTFE. The Court used this document as ammunition for its “Nanking Massacre” campaign,
never subjecting the “evidence” or accompanying “testimonies” to even perfunctory scrutiny.
The year of Japan’s defeat in World War II, 1945, marked the ninth anniversary of the Nanking
Incident. However, the writer of an article that appeared in the December 15, 1945 edition of the
Shanghai newspaper Dagongbao expressed surprise that “offerings were seen at only a very few
homes, and that very few residents spoke fondly of the dead, voiced gratitude at having survived
the war, or shed tears over the terrible tragedy that occurred nine years ago.” The article
continues: “When Chiang Kai-shek’s organizations (the Nationalist Party and the Nationalist
government) investigated enemy atrocities, they estimated the number of victims at 500,000.
Why, then, are we seeing offerings at only a very few homes?” Why indeed? Perhaps because
the “terrible tragedy” had never occurred?
The 500,000 figure was arrived at by inflating the original estimate of 300,000-400,000 victims
submitted to the IMTFE, details of which follow.
Total number of persons killed:

300,000-400,000

Number of houses burned or otherwise destroyed:More than 4,000

Number of women raped or killed after rejecting sexual advances:

20-30

Number of persons arrested and still missing:184

Number of murder victims:

2,179,586

Location of Bodies

Number of Bodies; Witnesses

1. Xinhe District

2,873(Burial workers Shen Shizheng andChang Kaixing)

2. Near Army Arsenal outside South Gate;
Huashenmiao

More than 7,000(Burial workers Rui Fangyuan andZhang Hongru)

3. Caoxiexia District

57,418(Lu Su, a survivor)

4. Hanzhong Gate

More than 2,000(Wu Zhangde and Chen Yongqing,34

survivors)
5. Linggu Temple

More than 3,000(Gao Guanwu, a traitor; epitaph on
the tombstone of an unknown
person)

6. Total number of bodies buried by Chongshantang
and Hongwanzihui (Red Swastika Society)More than 155,300

If we add the figures shown in 1-6, they total 227,591, not 2,179,586, as stated above. The
connection between 279,586 and the initial estimate (340,000) is unclear. The number of women
who were raped or killed after they were raped (20-30) had multiplied a thousandfold to 20,000
by the time judgements were handed down at the Tokyo Trials.
The breakdown of burial figures is as follows:
Red Swastika Society

43,071Chongshantang

112,261

Total

155,332

What is problematic here is the number of bodies allegedly buried (upwards of 155,000). Boththe Red Swastika Society and Chongshantang issued charts listing details of burials including
place, date, sex, and sites where bodies were found. However, since these charts were createdafter World War II had ended, their veracity is suspect.
Nevertheless, they were accepted without question by the IMTFE, according to the Court’s
judgement, which describes the number of confirmed victims as follows.
Estimates made at a later date indicate that the total number of civilians andprisoners of war murdered in Nanking and its vicinity during the first six weeks of
the Japanese occupation was over 200,000. That these estimates are not
exaggerated is borne out by the fact that burial societies and other organizations
counted more than 155,000 bodies which they buried.68
Obviously, these burial statistics were used as irrefutable proof that there had been a massacre.
Defense attorneys, of course, objected to the admission of this “evidence,” on the following
grounds:
The burial charts were prepared 10 years after the fact. It is not possible to make any definitive35

statement about corpses after 10 years have elapsed, so we must assume that these figures
were invented.
In view of the sites where the bodies were discovered, they must have been those of soldierskilled in action. It is mistaken to assume that they were victims of a massacre perpetrated by
Japanese military personnel.
These figures were, most likely, invented. For instance, Chongshantang supposedly buried anaverage of 130 bodies per day until the end of April. However, there is a sudden rise in thenumbers after that, to an average of 2,600 bodies per day for 10 successive days.
Yuhuatai, Shuixi Gate, and Zhongshan Gate are areas that were swept by the Japanese military,which would have removed or arranged for the removal of any corpses found. In any case, it
is extremely unlikely that so many bodies remained at those locations five months after
hostilities had ended.
Virtually no women or children are listed in Red Swastika Society records. But in Chonshantang
records, figures for men, women, and children have been carefully supplied to reflect the
portion of the population each group accounts for. They were certainly fabricated.
Anyone who examined the burial records would have broached the objections raised by the
defense. Nevertheless, the Court overruled those objections, and handed down a judgement
defining all bodies interred as those of massacre victims.
This writer has harbored suspicions about Chongshantang for years. I asked people connectedwith the Nanking Incident, as well as those familiar with Nanking to provide information about
the organization.
Former Col. Nakazawa Mitsuo (chief of staff, 16th Division) responded as follows, based on his
experiences in Nanking.
The Japanese military undertook the main responsibility for burials, for which we
hired many private organizations and a great number of coolies. The widespread
perception that the Red Swastika Society and Chongshantang undertook the burial
work independently of the Japanese military is incorrect. These charts werecreated on the basis of statements from coolies who took part in work supervisedby the Japanese.
According to Testimonies: The Great Nanking Massacre, each Chongshantang burial crew
consisted of a foreman, a regular worker, and 10 temporary laborers, for a total of 12 persons.69
But as mentioned previously, the organization allegedly buried an average of 2,600 bodies perday. In an era when there were no bulldozers or power shovels, and when most trucks were
owned by the military, how could Chongshantang have managed to inter so many bodies?
Furthermore, no Japanese ever saw such a burial crew at work.
36

Recently, Ara Ken’ichi discovered some documents that further discredit claims made aboutburials conducted by Chongshantang. All of them are Chinese historical records, and all of themrefute claims that Chongshantang buried 112,000 between December 1937 and May 1938.70“Statistical Report for 1935 Prepared by the Nanking City Government.” This report contains alist of charitable organizations, on which both the Red Swastika Society (described as abranch of the World Red Swastika Society) and Chongshantang appear. Chongshantang
dated back to 1797, but its main activities were supplying alms (mainly clothing) to the poor,and providing aid to widows and children. Nowhere in this report is there any mention of
burial work.
“The Situation in Nanking: 1938.”71 Subsequent to the Japanese occupation, private charitablegroups founds themselves with almost no financial resources. In September 1938, theNationalist government awarded subsidies to 26 organizations, including Chongshantang.
But it is clear, from this document as well, that the organization had no connection withinterring the dead. Furthermore, Chongshantang is described as still active, but on a verysmall scale. The following passage concernes burials.
Disposition of Caskets and Dead Bodies
Corpses inside and outside the city were disposed of by burial crews organized by
the Red Swastika Society and the Self-Government Committee. Before the burial
work commenced, caskets were interred by relatives. Unclaimed caskets andbodies were transported outside the city and interred.
Here again, there is no mention of Chongshantang. Burials were performed only by the Red
Swastika Society and the Self-Government Committee.
Nanking,72 compiled by the Nanking Japanese Chamber of Commerce, contains “The Nanking
City Government Service Committee: Statement of Income and Expenditures for MayDecember, 1938.” This is part of a financial report for the City of Nanking, and states that the
Executive Yuan of the government expended 150,000 yuan in subsidies to charitableorganizations. An accompanying chart shows that the largest subsidies (1,000 yuan permonth) went to the Red Swastika Society and Pushanhui, with seven other groups, including
Chongshantang, receiving 200 yuan each per month. The statement also reports that “private
charitable organizations had been inactive for a time because the conflict in Nanking had
depleted their finances. However, when they received subsidies from the Service Committee,
they gradually resumed their activities.” Chongshantang was not able to resume its activities
full scale until September 1938, eight months after the occupation. This information is totallyinconsistent with Chinese claims that the organization interred more than 110,000 bodies
during the four months following the occupation.

B. Red Swastika Society Burial Records Unreliable
37

The burial records submitted by the Red Swastika in chart form are also suspect. In one sectionof the chart no burial site is listed, only “December 28: 6,466 bodies.” This figure far surpasses
any specified before or after this date. Furthermore, according to the diaries of International
Committee member George Fitch and Hamasaki Tomizo (45th Regiment), there was heavy
snowfall on December 28.
The April 16, 1938 edition of the Osaka Asahi Shimbun carried an article that reads, in part:“According to recent reports, 1,793 bodies have been interred in Nanking, and 30,311 in its
environs.” When we combine these two figures, we arrive at a total of 32,104 bodies; and when
we subtract the aforementioned 6,466 bodies that the Red Swastika Society claimed to haveinterred on December 28 from the total number of burials reported by the Society, we arrive at a
total of 36,605. A discrepancy of 4,000 still remains, but Itakura Yoshiaki suspects that thefigures for December 28, 1937 were invented by the Red Swastika Society. Hora Tomio
disagrees. Last winter, a group of proponents of the “Nanking Massacre,” including Hora, went
on an inspection tour of Nanking. There, they noticed that “on the original copy of the chart,
which is housed at the Dan’anguan in Nanking, a piece of white paper has been pasted over the
December 28th entry in the “Burial Site” column. Underneath the paper is printed ‘Corpses
dumped into Yangtze River near Xiaguan.’” Hora conjectures that the Society wanted to conceal
the fact that its crews had disposed of those corpses by dumping them into the river instead ofadhering to standard burial practices, and that the 6,466 figure represents six days of work, notone. These are merely his conjectures, however, and not evidence.73
An examination of a table in Testimonies: The Great Nanking Massacre, reputedly a collectionof official Chinese sources, reveals that on December 28, 6,468 bodies were placed in caskets
and buried at “Pude Temple outside Zhonghua Gate.”74 Citing this inconsistency, Itakura writes:
Xiaguan is situated to the north of Nanking, diametrically opposite the area
outside Zhonghua Gate, which is south of the city. Further confusing the issue isthe fact that, according to IMTFE references to evidence not admitted, including
15 photographs, those same 6,468 bodies were interred by Chongshantang.75
If Hora insists on attacking me because he is convinced that those corpses weredumped in the river, he must first prove that the aforementioned official
documents are worthless. However, efforts in that direction will surely castfurther doubts on the reliability of burial records.
We believe we have provided sufficient evidence to convince readers that the Chongshantang
burial statistics are totally fictitious, and that the Red Swastika Society’s were inflated. In closing,
we would like to add the following.

1. Most of the bodies buried were those of Chinese soldiers killed in action, not victims
of a massacre. The fact that only a few women and children are listed among the deadinterred by the Red Swastika Society lends credence to this theory.
38

2. In the fall of 1937, thousands of wounded and sick soldiers were transported to Nanking frombattlefields in Shanghai, Wuxi, and Changzhou. According to the diary kept by a foreign
resident of Nanking, the city was filled with soldiers and reeked of medicine. Governmentbuildings and even private homes were requisitioned to house them.76 Soldiers who diedfrom their wounds or illnesses, and those killed by aerial bombs should be accounted for in
the mortality statistics.

39

Chapter 9

Professor Smythe’s Report on
War Damage in the Nanking Area
One of the most trustworthy primary sources relating to the Nanking Incident is Lewis S.C.
Smythe’s War Damage in the Nanking Area, A Sociological Survey. The scientific and rational
methods used in its preparation raise it to a status unparalleled by any other reference.
Smythe, a professor of sociology at Jinling University, had conducted similar surveys in the past.
During his tenure as both secretary and treasurer of the International Committee, he madeunsparing efforts toward maintaining order in the Safety Zone and establishing good relations
with Japanese military officials. On February 10, after transferring its duties to the SelfGovernment Committee, the International Committee disbanded. With the assistance ofProfessor Bates, Smythe hired a large number of Chinese students and, over a period of
approximately two months, proceeded to conduct a survey on war damage sustained by theresidents of Nanking. For the survey, Smythe used the random sampling method. He dideverything he could to ensure that it would be meticulous, accurate, rational, and fair.
For the portion of the survey that focused on households, the students, working in teams of two,
visited one out of every 50 occupied homes. They interviewed the residents and multiplied thefigures obtained from those interviews by 50. For the portion relating to damage to houses, theteams inspected one house in 10. A certain amount of bias was inevitable, since the interviews
were conducted by Chinese students, but the scientific methods used cannot be faulted.
Smythe’s survey covered not only the Nanking city limits, but also Xiaguan and other areas
located immediately outside the city’s gates. The fieldwork was done between March 9 and April2, and analyzed between April 9 and 23. The survey of buildings was conducted between March
15 and June 15. Smythe also conducted an agricultural survey in six counties adjacent toNanking, from March 8-23, covering damage to crops, seed, farming equipment, as well as
human casualties.
The survey results reveal that of the 3,250 persons who died as a result of the hostilities, 850
were killed during military operations. Soldiers violence was responsible for the deaths of 2,400
and injuries to 3,050 others.
A table from Smythe’s report, which we have reproduced here, shows that 89% of the 2,400
deaths and 90% of the 3,050 injuries occurred subsequent to December 13, i.e., after theJapanese had occupied Nanking. The 4,200 persons listed as having been “taken away” mayhave been drafted by the Japanese to serve as stevedores or to do other types of labor but, as
Smythe notes, most of them hadn’t been heard from as late as June:40

In addition to those reported killed and injured, 4200 were taken away under military arrest.
Persons seized for temporary carrying or other military labor were seldom so reported. Very few
of those here mentioned were heard from in any way up to June.77
Thus, those 4200 must contribute an important addition to the number of killed by soldiers.78

Another table in Smythe’s report (Table 5), which classifies the dead according to age and sex,
lists the number of males as 2,400 (71%) and the number of females as 1,000 (29%). However,according to burial records kept by the Red Swastika Society, only 0.4% of the 1,793 bodies
interred in Nanking were those of women. Therefore, though his survey was conducted inaccordance with sound scientific methods, it seems to be marred by a significant amount of bias.
Since bias of this sort would not result in an underestimation of the number of persons killed, thecorrect figures may very well be lower than those stated in his report.
Proponents of the “Nanking Massacre” have disparaged this worthy report, refusing to find any
merit in it. Hora Tomio and others who share his views are convinced that approximately
200,000 persons (including 70,000-80,000 civilians) were killed in Nanking. They warn us not to“abuse” casualty statistics.79 They object to Smythe’s findings, i.e., that 2,400 persons were
killed and 4,200 abducted by Japanese troops, for a total of 6,600 dead or assumed dead. Hora
also cites the number of dead in the six counties surrounding Nanking as stated in Smythe’sreport: “Note the inordinate number of civilians who died.”80 But ironically, Hora has opted toespouse the theory Edgar Snow posits in The Battle for Asia — 300,000, believing this figure to
be correct. Hora embraces theories that agree with his own, and discards those that do not.
Repeated requests on the part of defense attorneys at the IMTFE to summon Smythe as awitness were denied. The court would accept only his affidavit, which stated simply that hehad indeed made the aforementioned survey.81
Witnesses were never punished for perjuring themselves at the IMTFE. Smythe wrote his
affidavit in Nanking at a time when the Republic of China was engaged in a frantic, nationwide
campaign to expose Japanese crimes. Smythe could have followed Bates’ example and inflated
or otherwise altered the results of his survey. The perfect excuse was at his disposal: His original
figures were stated in order to placate the Japanese, who were in control of Nanking. But he did
not. Smythe possessed the pride and conscience that one would expect of a scholar, andconfidence in his work. The Nanking District Court Prosecutor’s Report on the Investigation of
Crimes Committed by the Enemy, which asserted that the “massacre” had claimed 340,000
victims, was prepared in February 1946. Smythe signed his affidavit on June 7, 1946. By doingso, he was implying that his figures were correct; he never made any revisions to his report.
As we mentioned previously, the fieldwork for Smythe’s investigation was done by teams ofChinese students who, equipped with safe-conduct passes, combed the six counties surrounding
Nanking, and conducted in-depth interviews with farmers to determine war damage incurred. Ifanything resembling a massacre had occurred, it would have been reported to Smythe, Bates, orother International Committee members and, without question, included in Smythe’s report. The
fact that it was not is proof that there was no massacre.
41

NUMBER AND CAUSE OF DEATHS AND INJURIES BY DATE
Deaths byDate(1937-1938)

Military
operations

Before Dec. 12600

Dec. 12, 13

50

Dec. 4-Jan. 1---

Jan. 14-Mar. 15---

Soldiers’
violence

Unknown

---

--250

--200

150

Total

850

2400

Military
operations
50

---

2000

Date unknown

Per cent of casesof violenceoccurring afterDec. 13th

Injuries by150

Unknown

Taken
away**

---

---

---

---

250

---

2200

---

---

---

--150

Soldiers’‘ vio
lence

---

50

200
---

650

Per cent
killed andinjured bysoldiers’
violence
---

200

550

91

3700

4550

92

250

---

---

600

50

50

1000

75

3050

250

4200

6750

81

89

90

* By “military operations” is meant bombing, shelling, or bullets fired in battle.
** Most of those “taken away” have not been heard from in any manner.

42

---

Total
killedandinjuredChapter 10

Gen. He Yingqin’s Military Report
How do Chinese references describe the Nanking Incident? This writer is in possession of a copyof Modern Chinese History: The Conflict With Japan, published by Wenxing Shudian in Taipei.
It was written by Gen. He Yingqin and edited by Wu Xiangxiang. The first printing was issued
in December 1948, and the second in June 1962.
Neither the PRC government (not established until 1949) nor Chinese Communist forces had any
connection whatsoever with the Battle of Nanking. Chinese soldiers who fought in that conflict
were under the command of Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist government. Gen. He Yingqin,
one of the top-ranking officers in the Nationalist Army, served as both minister of defense andchairman of the Military Affairs Committee. The aforementioned book contains the military
reports written by Gen. He between 1937 (the year of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident) and 1945
(when Japan was defeated in World War II). The reports were submitted on an annual basis to
the Legislative Yuan, a branch of the Nationalist government equivalent to Japan’s Diet, forapproval. They are detailed and lengthy, covering a total of 688 pages.
A statement in the book’s introduction attests to the completeness and accuracy of their content:“The references included herein are exhaustive, and recount events as they actually occurred.”
The reports include several hundred pages of statistics and maps. The statistics list the number ofsoldiers killed and wounded in action in units of tens and hundreds. Military organization andcombat conditions are also described in minute detail. Because these are also official records,
they are primary sources, and probably the most informative and reliable Chinese sources
available.
What did Gen. He write about the conflict in Nanking? This particular report was presented at aninterim session of the Legislative Yuan in the spring of 1938, when the wounds of the fall of the
Nationalist capital, Nanking, were still raw. It covers the period between July 1937 and February
1938. In its table of contents, we find: “Military operations conducted from the commencementof hostilities to the fall of Nanking.” Readers are referred to p. 82 for an account of the fall of
Nanking, which is very brief account (only six lines long) and, at first glance, seems almost
perfunctory. However, organization charts and other specific information are provided in“Military operations conducted from the fall of Nanking to early March 1938.”
The account of the fall of Nanking reads as follows.
After abandoning the Xicheng line on November 26, the Supervisory Unit, the 36th and 88th
divisions, and the 10th, 66th, 74th, and 83rd armies were ordered to assist in the defense of
Nanking. Since all of these units had been engaged in combat for quite some time, their members
were exhausted. They withdrew from the banks of the Suzhou River, and headed for Nanking.
However, on their way there, they became involved in several conflicts, and were unable toregroup. The majority of 10th Army soldiers were raw recruits lacking combat skills, a factor thatsignificantly reduced the effectiveness of that unit. Beginning on December 5, battles were fought

43

at Tangshan and Chunhuazhen. On December 8, Tangshan fell to the enemy. Forced to abandon
their position at Fukuo, our troops were pursued relentlessly by the enemy. All units engaged inintense, bloody battles. Many men were killed or wounded. Unable to defend the last position at
Yuhuatai on December 12, they were ordered to abandon Nanking. The enemy occupied Nanking
on December 13.82

Note that there is no reference in this account to Japanese atrocities or a “Nanking Massacre.”
Also contained in the report are over 100 charts and tables containing detailed statistics for eachbattle fought, but these too are devoid of any mention of a massacre in Nanking.
According to this report, 33,000 Chinese soldiers were killed in action in Shanghai and Nanking(Combat Zone 3) and 65,340 wounded, for a total of 98,340. In those conflicts, 23,104 Japanesesoldiers died in action and 50,000 from diseases contracted on the battlefront. In contrast, theChinese figures seem low, but we have no reason to believe that they are inaccurate.
The Japanese suffered enormous losses in Shanghai, where most of their casualties occurred.
Conversely, the Chinese lost far more men in Nanking than they did in Shanghai. In an entry in
his diary, included in The Secret Memoirs of Chiang Kai-Shek, Chiang Kai-shek wrote that morethan 6,000 Chinese soldiers were killed or wounded during their attempt to defend Nanking.83
Chinese propagandists habitually understated their own losses, while inflating those of theiropponents. When Imperial General Headquarters announced the Japanese victory in Nanking, it
reported 86,000 enemy casualties. This was an overstatement, but it pales in comparison to
Chiang’s understatement.
Again, there is not the slightest hint of a massacre in Nanking, much less one that claimed thelives of more than 10,000 Chinese, in this official, primary source prepared by Gen. He Yingqin.
This writer is grateful to Takagi Keizo, a China specialist who was intimate with Gen. He, forhaving supplied this reference. Takagi offered the following comment on the Nanking Incident.
If tens or hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers and civilians were killed in Nanking, there
would certainly have been mention of that in this report. But there is none. There have been many
debates about the events that transpired in Nanking over the years. I cannot understand why noone has referred to this report, which is an official document issued by a nation with which Japan
was at war.

Takagi’s point is well taken. If the mission of the IMTFE had been to administer justice, theseimportant references would have been admitted as evidence. Needless to say, the governments ofboth the Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China are in possession of these
documents.
However, Gen. He’s report was not cited at the IMTFE. In fact, most of the evidence relating to
the Nanking Incident presented did not derive from primary sources, or even secondary or eventertiary sources, but from hearsay, political propaganda, guesswork, and fiction. Figures44

supposedly representing the number of victims of the “massacre” ballooned until they took on alife of their own.
Even those known to this writer from books or articles published in Taiwan, Hong Kong, andBeijing vary wildly, as follows.
Sources published in the Republic of China (Taiwan) and Hong Konga. More than 100,000: An Outline of the Eight-Year Conflict by Chen Cheng, Army chief ofstaff, 1946
b. 340,000: Nanking District Court Prosecutor’s Report on the Investigation of Crimes
Committed by the Enemy, 1946
c. More than 100,000: A Brief History of Chinese Resistance, Ministry of Defense Departmentof Political History, 1952
d. More than 100,000: History of the People’s Revolution, compiled from a variety of Republicof China sources in commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Sun Yatsen,
1965
e. More than 100,000: History of the War of Resistance Against Japan, 1966
f. More than 100,000: A Short History of the Sino-Japanese Conflict, Defense ResearchInstitute, 1968
g. 200,000: Anti-Japanese Resistance, Jiang Jingguo, 1978
Sources published in the People’s Republic of Chinaa. 430,000: Reform Daily, 1945
b. 200,000: People’s Daily, 1946
c. 300,000: Worker’s Daily, 1946
d. 300,000: History of China at War, Shu Zongfu and Cao Jurene. 300,000: People’s China (Japanese translation), 1947
f. 300,000: Government-approved textbooks currently in use
g. Several hundred thousand: The Great Nanking Massacre, Department of History, Universityof Nanking, 1948h. 400,000: Testimonies: The Great Nanking Massacre, edited by the Historical Reference
Research Committee, City of Nanking, 1984
1. All of these publications were written subsequent to the IMTFE, and are what I refer to as“sources created after the fact.”
2. Inexplicably, most of the publications issued by organizations connected with the Nationalist
government (the government in place at the time of the Nanking Incident) state the numberof victims as “more than 100,000,” while figures issued by PRC government-related
publications range from “more than 300,000” to “400,000.”
3. Figures listed in PRC publications vary, increasing every decade or so. They have been
inflated for political purposes, and have no basis in fact.
45

Some Japanese actually believe these figures, and have begun to denounce the “Nanking
Massacre.” Their efforts in this direction are far more passionate and persistent than those of theChinese. Furthermore, figures concocted to achieve political objectives now appear in Japanese
textbooks. Will our descendants be forced to acquiesce to these figures for all time, even though
they have been exponentially distorted? Surely I am not the only one who harbors this fear.
Worst of all, these numbers are now being used as political and diplomatic weapons.
Nationalist Soldiers Killed or Wounded in Action
Between July 7 and December 12, 1937
Conflicts in Shanghai and Nanking (Combat Zone 3)
WoundedKilledTotal

Nationwide
Combat Zones 1, 2, 3, 5, 10
WoundedKilledTotal

Officers

3,288

1,638

4,926

9,810

4,884

14,694Non-commissioned
officers, rank andfile

62,052

31,362

93,414

233,142

119,856

352,998

Totals65,34033,00098,340242,952

124,740

367,692(Compiled by the Military Organization Bureau, Military Administration Department)
Source: Modern Chinese History: The Conflict with Japan, He Yingqin

46

Chapter 11

No Mention of the “Nanking Massacre”
in Chinese Communist Party Records
How did the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) and the Red Army perceive the Nanking Incident?
The massacre of hundreds of thousands of Chinese would have served as excellent fodder for theanti-Japanese propaganda machine. And in their crusade to win rights for China’s peasants, theCommunists were battling another enemy, the Nationalists, and would have taken advantage of
any opportunity to discredit them.
Beginning on May 26, 1938, Mao Zedong began his now famous nine-day lecture entitled “On
Protracted War” at a forum in Yan’an held to discuss strategies for resisting Japanese inroads
into China. Mao criticized Japanese military tactics, citing the hostilities in and around Nanking
as an example: The Japanese succeeded in surrounding their opponents there, but failed toannihilate them. He did not, however, utter one word about a massacre’s having taken place inthat city. Nor do any other contemporaneous documents mention a “Nanking Massacre,” though
their authors do not hesitate to hold Nationalist negligence responsible for the fall of Nanking.
In connection with the absence of references to a massacre in Chinese documents, Takagi Keizo,
the aforementioned China scholar, told this writer that such references are nowhere to be foundeither in Gen. He Yingqin’s report or in PRC records.
A book entitled Chinese Military Affairs During Wartime has been published on the Mainland. It
is a collection of contemporaneous publications relating to Chinese military affairs, and includes
Issue No. 109 of Military Affairs Magazine, dated June 20, 1938, which contains the earliest PRC
account of the conflict at Nanking. The account reads as follows. “On the night of December 12,
the enemy invaded Nanking. A fierce battle, waged on the city’s streets, ensued. Ground troops
were assisted by aircraft units. By noon on December 13, the fighting, much of it hand-to-handcombat, had become even more intense. Realizing that it was no longer politically crucial tocontinue to defend Nanking (all government organizations had been moved to Hankou),
Nationalist troops decided to abandon the city in order to avoid incurring further, needlesscasualties.”84

Readers will note that there are no allusions to the massacre of civilians or of prisoners of war by
the Japanese military in this account.
The Japanese didn’t know about the Nanking Incident, and it’s quite obvious that the Chinese
didn’t, either — not the Communist Party, nor the Nationalist Party. Their ignorance is thestrongest evidence that no massacre occurred.
Agnes Smedley, an American and the author of Battle Hymn of China,85 was a Comintern
member. (She was also the person responsible for having introduced Soviet spy Richard Sorge
who supplied information to the U.S.S.R. that may very well have affected Japan’s fate in WorldWar II to Ozaki Hotsumi, also a Soviet agent, in Shanghai.) Smedley travelled with Communist
47

Chinese leaders such as Mao Zedong, Zhu De, and Zhou Enlai. Her book is an account of her
journey from Yan’an to Hankou. In it she describes the fall of Nanking and her impressions of
the city, but does not refer to a massacre or to Japanese atrocities.
In the summer of 1938, a team of five Indian physicians travelled to Hankou on a relief mission.
They met with both Nationalist and Communist party leaders, and kept records of theirexperiences. Besides describing combat conditions they encountered during their travels, thephysicians also write that the Chinese complained about Japanese crimes. However, they do notmake any mention of a massacre.
In actuality, neither the Nationalist government in Taiwan nor the PRC government in Beijing
voiced the word “massacre” until after Japan’s defeat in World War II. Prior to the IMTFE, whenthe Allies unilaterally judged the vanquished, and to “trials” of Class B and C war criminals at
various locations, there was no massacre. Not only the Japanese, but also the Chinese were
hearing of it for the first time.
Himeda Tsuyoshi is the perpetrator of the Japanese translation of the aforementioned
Testimonies: The Great Nanking Massacre, which purports to be a collection of official Chinese
documents. In his commentary, he “explains” why there are no contemporaneous, official
Nationalist or Communist records relating to a massacre in Nanking.
Even after three of four years had elapsed, no references to the Nanking Massacre appeared in
Chinese records describing the conflict with Japan. The most likely explanation is that theCommunists had just united with the Nationalists to resist the Japanese, and the former refrained
from mentioning the incident out of consideration for the latter.86

If the issue at hand weren’t such a serious one, we might find this interpretation amusing.
In 1941, the Research Committee on Current Affairs in Yan’an issued a series of books entitled
China in Wartime. One of the volumes, Chinese Military Affairs in Wartime, holds Nationalist
troops responsible for the fall of Nanking:Who is to blame for the ruin and utter chaos in which our retreating troops were engulfed? (...)
How sad that a few high-ranking government officials failed to understand that moving thecapital does not mean deserting it. They lost their ability to think clearly and rationally. In
addition to alarming the Chinese people, their behavior made them the laughingstock offoreigners. 87

Though the authors are unsparing in their criticism of Nationalist government officials, they
make no mention of a massacre.
Returning to Himeda’s commentary, another explanation he provides follows.
Word of the Nanking Massacre did not reach ordinary Chinese citizens mainly because Japanese
authorities controlled the media and prevented their representatives from writing or broadcastingnews stories about it.88

48

If Himeda is implying that Japanese censors muzzled the Chinese government and the press, heis wrong. Even if they had attempted to do so, they lacked the power to silence the Chinese
people. Not even a child would fall for this argument. In its Book Review section, the Asahi
Shinbun described Himeda’s commentary as “glittering.” However, as the proverb tells us, allthat glitters is not gold.
Why, after nearly half a century, is the Chinese Communist Party clamoring: “Four hundred
thousand persons were massacred in Nanking.89 (...) Evidence abounds. We will accept no
excuses?”90
Not until 1985, during the reign of Deng Xiaoping, was a memorial hall for the victims of the
Nanking Massacre erected. The hall’s facade bears the inscription “Victims: 300000.” When theCommunists came into power (1949), one of the first projects launched by Mao Zedong was theconstruction of a monument to Communist martyrs. The inscription on the monument reads:
The Nationalist Government captured 300,000 Chinese Communist Party activists, brought themto Nanking, and slaughtered all of them at this execution site in Yuhuatai. This memorial park
was created to comfort the souls of those heroes.

The political motives behind the sudden appearance of a monument to the victims of the“Nanking Massacre” with an inscription bearing the same figure (300,000) are patently obvious.

49

Chapter 12

No Protest Against the “Nanking Massacre”
Submitted to the League of Nations
As we stated earlier, accounts of the “Nanking Massacre” in textbooks written for Japanese
middle- and high-school students include statements such as “at the time, Japan was censured by
the nations of the world.” In this chapter, we shall proceed to disprove this claim.
Between 1920 and 1946, the League of Nations (the forerunner of the United Nations and thefirst permanent organization of its kind) attempted to resolve international problems. Neither theUnited States nor the Soviet Union ever joined the League; Japan withdrew subsequent to the
Manchurian Incident (1931), and Germany and Italy not long thereafter. However, the UnitedStates maintained observer status throughout the League’s existence, and participated inconferences held when disputes arose. Japan was asked to take part in several international
conferences. By 1937, the U.S.S.R. was also an observer.
The matter of the Second Sino-Japanese War was brought before the Far East Advisory
Committee during a meeting of the League’s Assembly in August 1937. The United States was
represented on the Committee; Japan was also invited to join it, but declined. As a result of aresolution adopted by the Committee, another conference was held in November of the same
year in Brussels. Japan received an invitation from the Belgian government to take part in theproceedings, at which representatives of the United States were present, but again declined.
At that time, League of Nations conferences provided a forum for participants to exercise theirconsiderable debating skills in arguing international problems. When the Second Sino-Japanese
War began, Chiang Kai-shek, with support from the U.S.S.R., used League conferences as
diplomatic weapons against Japan. Not long before the invasion of Nanking, the Nationalist
government had received a peace proposal from Japan. Instead of replying promptly, theydragged their feet, hoping that a resolution more favorable to them would be adopted at the
League’s Brussels Conference. They hedged their bets, so to speak, and by doing so, failed toissue a response in time to forestall the Japanese assault on Nanking.
Gu Weijun served as China’s representative to the League of Nations. His League activities
dated back to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, at which the organization was established.
From then on, he served as China’s representative to the League. The Columbia University
graduate had been endowed with a commanding presence, and his many connections in both theAmerican political and international diplomatic arenas helped him garner success after success.
The League of Nations was asked to debate incidents involving the Japanese that had occurred in
North China at the 18th Conference of its Assembly, which met between August 13 and October
6, 1937. These matters were submitted to the Far East Advisory Committee, which took China’sside, and decided to hold a conference in Brussels, at which the Sino-Japanese Conflict Appeal
was adopted. China also submitted the Resolution to Condemn Japanese Bombardment of Towns
50

in China, in connection with Japanese aerial bombing of Nanking and Guangdong (Canton),which was adopted by the Committee and the Assembly. In fact, China issued protests to the
League against every Japanese military action, which would invariably support the Chinese
position, and pass resolutions condemning Japan.
The 100th Conference of the League of Nations’ Council commenced on January 26, 1938,
subsequent to the fall of Nanking. During that conference, Great Britain, France, the U.S.S.R.,
and China formed the Sino-Japanese Conflict Committee. The Commission’s members
proceeded to discuss the possibility of international support for China. However, China failed toprevail this time, due in part to American apathy. However, on February 3, the League’s Council
unanimously passed a resolution promising support for China, with the exception of two nations,which abstained.
If atrocities were perpetrated by the Japanese in Nanking, as some would like us to believe, if
Japanese military personnel indeed looted, raped, and murdered, and if the atrocities they
committed were far more heinous than the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then a protest
would surely have been submitted to the League of Nations and, as usual, Japan would have been
censured. But Gu Weijun never submitted any such protest.
The 101st Conference of the League of Nations’ Council opened on May 9, 1938. China asked
the League to censure Japanese aerial bombing and the use of poison gas during the conflict at
Shandong. These proposals were adopted unanimously. But the League never censured Japan fora massacre in Nanking, accusations of which were never even brought before the League.
Judging from these events, it is obvious that the “Nanking Massacre” was a fiction created at theTokyo Trials. In other words, there was no “Nanking Massacre” prior to the IMTFE.

51

Chapter 13

No Protest Against the “Nanking Massacre”
from the United States, Great Britain, or France
What was the reaction to the invasion and subsequent occupation of Nanking in diplomatic
circles? When Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro announced that he would engage in no further
dialogues with the Nationalist government, on January 16, 1938, both Japan and China recalled
their ambassadors. However, the Chinese continued to file protests against Japan. In fact, after
the Nationalist government relocated to Chunking (Chongqing) in November 1938, these
protests became more frequent, taking the form of the Wang Chonghui91 Declaration, the Chiang
Kai-Shek Declaration, the Nationalist Government Declaration, and the National Assembly
Declaration, to name some of them. However, the Nationalists issued no protest in connection
with the Japanese occupation of Nanking.
During negotiations following two separate incidents in which the Japanese sank the American
gunboat Panay and shelled the British gunboat Ladybird, Japan offered profuse, sincere
apologies, and acceded to demands for reparations from the two affected nations. A variety ofother protests were submitted by the United States, Great Britain, and France, all of whichenjoyed considerable rights and interests in China. The Japanese responded to each and every
one of these protests by issuing apologies and making reparations for damages. Housed in the
Diplomatic Record Office of Japan’s Foreign Ministry is a long list of goods offered by way ofcompensation; it includes even automobiles and ships. The Ministry’s gestures demonstrate how
anxious the Japanese government was to avoid displeasing the Western powers.
Normally, when an international protest is lodged, it is signed by at least two nations. One andonly one such protest, which accuses the Japanese of indiscriminate aerial bombing during theassault on Nanking, was submitted by the United States, Great Britain, and France on September
22, 1937. According to an investigation conducted by Lewis Smythe, about 600 Chinese
civilians were killed by Japanese shelling and aerial bombing (see pp. 62-63). New York Times
correspondent Tillman Durdin wrote that fires set by Chinese troops (the scorched-earth strategy)caused far more damage than Japanese aerial bombing, and that the Japanese did not fire one
shot into the Safety Zone. The point we wish to make here is that not one of the many protests
lodged even hints at a massacre or at Japanese atrocities.
The only explanation for this “oversight” is that no massacre ever occurred in Nanking.
Nevertheless, Japanese textbooks state that as a result of the Nanking Incident, Japan was
censured by the world’s nations. We would like to ask the authors of those textbooks and themembers of the Ministry of Education’s Textbook Authorization Research Council exactly
which nations censured Japan, and when and in what form they did so.

52Chapter 14

No Mention of the “Nanking Massacre”
in the American or British Press
A. Only Timperley and Durdin Wrote About Atrocities
As stated earlier, when the Japanese occupied Nanking, neither the Nationalist government(whose soldiers fought against Japan) nor the Chinese Communist Party accused the Japanesemilitary of having perpetrated a massacre in that city. Not until the IMTFE began, 10 years later,
was this accusation articulated. Nor did Western nations allege that a massacre had beencommitted. The vast majority of American and British journalists, in their coverage of Nanking,viewed incidents that occurred there as a breakdown of military discipline, not a massacre. Only
two publications focused on Japanese misconduct.
One was What War Means: Japanese Terror in China, edited by Manchester Guardiancorrespondent Harold Timperley, and published in July 1938 by Victor Gollancz Ltd. A Chinesetranslation was issued simultaneously, under the title Acts of Violence Committed by JapaneseMilitary Personnel as Witnessed by Foreign Nationals, and included a foreword written bystatesman and scholar Guo Moruo. Both versions were intended to serve as anti-Japanese
propaganda and were widely disseminated. What War Means enumerates Japanese “atrocities” inNanking, and also contains reports written by foreigners on Japanese bombings in North andcentral China. A portion of the documents prepared by the International Committee for the
Nanking Safety Zone is included as supplementary material. After the end of World War II, thisbook was translated into Japanese.92 The translation became the bible of Japanese proponents of
the “Nanking Massacre.” For instance, it is the first publication cited in Fujiwara Akira’s The
Great Nanking Massacre.93
Timperley was in Shanghai, not Nanking, at the time of the Japanese occupation. He had nofirsthand knowledge of events that transpired there. His role was simply to compile documentsthat presented the Japanese in a bad light, which he had received from friends in Nanking. What
War Means, like Edgar Snow’s Battle for Asia (1940), which we shall discuss later, cannot be
considered a primary source, based as it is on hearsay.
To support his view that What War Means is a reliable reference, Fujiwara quotes from Shanghai
Sojourn, written by Matsumoto Shigeharu, who was head of the Domei Tsushin Shanghai
Bureau at the time of the Nanking Incident.
Matsumoto responded: “Mr. Timperley, as a Japanese, I am terribly ashamed of the acts ofviolence and murders committed in Nanking. Your book will turn its readers against Japan, atleast temporarily, but that cannot be helped. We must offer a sincere apology to the Chinese
people — to the entire human race, in fact. I hope that your book will remind us that we must do
all possible to prevent a repetition of this tragedy. Thank you for your kind words.”9453

Fujiwara has quoted Matsumoto out of context. The passage he cites is preceded by:
Timperley appeared at my office and announced that he had edited a book entitled Japanese
Terror in China. He had the decency to add, “The book is anti-Japanese. There’s no question
about that. I’m sure that you will find it offensive, and it pains me greatly to think that ourfriendship may be affected. The times being what they are, I didn’t mention your name, but in my
Preface, I did express my great respect for the two of you. Please accept this book for what it is:propaganda.”95

More pertinently, the passage cited by Fujiwara is followed by:
I purchased the book in June, intending to read it in its entirety. However, I was so sickened by
the enumerations of incidents therein that I could not bear to read beyond the first half.96

Matsumoto had no personal knowledge of what took place in Nanking. Nor was his response to
Timperley’s announcement an opinion he had formed after reading Japanese Terror in China.
The comments he made to Timperley were nothing more than the meaningless niceties that areexchanged at social gatherings.
Later, it became clear that Timperley’s activities in China involved more than journalism. In The
Illusion of a Great Nanking Massacre: Updated Edition,97 Suzuki Akira writes that he found an
entry for Timperley in Notable Foreign Visitors to China: The Modern Era,98 which states thatthe latter was an advisor to the Nationalist Party’s Central Propaganda Department.
Timperley compiled What War Means while he was under the employ of the Central Propaganda
Department. Therefore, there is nothing strange about the fact that the Chinese translation was
issued simultaneously, in July of 1938, to commemorate the first anniversary of the Second SinoJapanese War. The book was intended to serve as propaganda for the Nationalist cause, andshould not be perceived as the independent work of a Western journalist. We hope that
proponents of the “Nanking Massacre” who have based their arguments on What War Means
will come their senses.
Later, Matsumoto spoke to journalists Arai Kiyoshi, Maeda Yuji, and Fukazawa Mikizo, all ofwhom reported on the Japanese conquest of Nanking and its aftermath. The following is his
report on their conversation.
All three men agreed that it was difficult to distinguish between acts of war, acts of violence, andoutright slaughter.99 They also shared the conviction that no massacre of tens of thousands of
persons ever occurred.100

The other publication is a two-part article written by F. Tillman Durdin, a correspondent for the
New York Times, which appeared in the December 18, 1937 and January 9 editions of thatnewspaper. Though Tillman criticizes the Japanese military for its brutality, he is more critical of
the Chinese, devoting more than two-thirds of his report to the Chinese “orgy of burning,” theinfiltration of the Safety Zone by Chinese soldiers dressed in civilian clothing, and acts of looting
committed by the Chinese. But the statistics he offers for the number of war dead on both sides
54and the number of persons executed by the Japanese are conjectures, and do not coincide withknown fact.
In defending the city as they did — against all the dictates of modern military strategy — theChinese allowed themselves to be trapped, surrounded and wiped out to the number of at least
33,000, about two-thirds of their army there. Of this number, it is estimated, about 20,000 were
executed.101

Elsewhere in the same article, Durdin writes: “Japanese casualties during the actual siege
probably totaled 1,000, Chinese casualties 3,000 to 5,000, perhaps more.” Later, he adds:
The Japanese themselves announced that during the first three days of cleaning up Nanking
15,000 Chinese soldiers were rounded up. At the time, it was contended that 25,000 more werestill hiding out in the city.
These figures give an accurate indication of the number of Chinese troops trapped within the
Nanking walls. Probably the Japanese figure of 25,000 is exaggerated, but it is likely that about
20,000 Chinese soldiers fell victim to Japanese executioners.

However, the main thrust of Durdin’s invective is directed toward Chiang Kai-shek and Tang
Shengzhi.
Certainly, General Chiang should not have permitted the blunder that occurred. Certainly,
General Tang, too, is to be strongly censured for starting on a course of sacrifice that he failed tocarry through or at best managed badly.
It may be that Tang made some efforts to save the situation on Sunday by arranging for a general
withdrawal under protection of small units left to hold up Japanese penetration far into the city.
Appearances indicate otherwise, and in any case the situation was not saved and Tang’s departure,
unknown even to many members of his own staff, left the army leaderless and was the signal forcomplete collapse.102

The Battle for Asia by Edgar Snow, who had already won acclaim for Red Star Over China(1938), was written three years after the Nanking Incident. Snow was not in Nanking when theincident occurred and, therefore, this book is not a trustworthy reference. It is intended to be an
account of the Second Sino-Japanese War as a whole, and Snow’s references to Nanking occupy
only a few pages, which are essentially paraphrases of reports written by Timperley and Durdin.
But Snow was a convincing writer, and The Battle for Asia was instrumental in propagating themyth of the “Nanking Massacre.” (Even Hora has conceded that The Battle for Asia is a secondrate source, and that it contains errors.)

B. No Editorials Condemning the Nanking Incident
By the time Nanking was transformed into a battlefield on December 12, 1938, most foreign
journalists had boarded the Panay to escape from Nanking. Remaining in the city were five55

journalists: Durdin (New York Times), McDaniel (Associated Press), Archibald Steele (Chicago
Daily News), Smith (Reuters), and Arthur Mencken (Paramount News).
McDonald, a correspondent for the London Times, was temporarily housed near Xiaguan
because the Panay had been sunk. He eventually returned to Shanghai (on December 17), but
resurfaced in Nanking on December 15, where he reported on events there.
The claim has been made that the “Nanking atrocities” created a sensation overseas, and earned
Japan the censure of other nations. Supposedly, only the Japanese knew nothing about it. In The
Great Nanking Massacre, Fujiwara Akira writes, “News of the numerous atrocities committed
by Japanese troops spread throughout the world like wildfire.”103
If three or four of the world’s tens of thousands of newspapers report on an incident, is thatworldwide coverage? Did the nations of the world indeed condemn Japan? The Nanking Incident
remained in the news only briefly, and was reported on by only a few newspapers. It is unlikelythat the four wire services that held a monopoly over news from China at the time (Reuters,
Associated Press, United Press, and Agence Havas) would have overlooked an incident in which
hundreds of thousands of Chinese were massacred — an incident allegedly equivalent inmagnitude to the genocide at Auschwitz.
Critic Ara Ken’ichi has embarked on a laborious enterprise, which involves searching the tablesof contents of editions of the New York Times published between December 1, 1938 and January
31, 1938, Time Magazine, and the British newspaper The London Times for articles about the
Nanking Incident. We regret that space constraints prevent us from printing the results of his
investigation in full here. Instead, we shall provide a summary.
Most of the China-related reports in the New York Times in December 1937 dealt with thesinking of the American gunboat Panay. Accounts relating to this incident were on the paper’s
front page for two weeks (December 13-26). They appeared not only on the front page, but alsoon, for instance, pp. 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, and 24 of the December 14 edition. No other Chinarelated news received this much coverage either before, during, or after the Panay incident. In
comparison, only a few lines of the first installment of Durdin’s two-part article about Nanking,its length notwithstanding, appeared on the front page of The New York Times. Nor were there
any other front-page articles or editorials about the “Nanking Massacre” in that newspaper.
Articles about the Nanking Incident were relegated to the Current Events section.
Between December 1, 1937 and January 31, 1938, the New York Times ran a total of 10 articles
about the situation in Nanking, some of which were brief, one-column articles. Among them was
one about Chinese officers who committed crimes for which the Japanese were blamed, an
excerpt from which follows.
American professors remaining at Ginling College in Nanking as foreign members of the Refugee
Welfare Committee were seriously embarrassed to discover that they had been harboring adeserted Chinese Army colonel and six of his subordinate officers. The professors had, in fact,
made the colonel second in authority at the refugee camp.104

56

From January 28-30, the newspaper printed articles describing the assault on U.S. Consul Allison
by a Japanese Army corporal. But not a single article appeared describing mass slaughter inNanking.
An article written by Archibald Steele (Chicago Daily News) describes the disorderly Chinese
retreat and the panic that ensued when the Japanese invaded Nanking, and is essentially neutral.
Durdin ends one of his articles with, “There was little glory for either side in the battle of
Nanking.”105 He also mentions that the Japanese executed Chinese soldiers and committed rapes.
Though the viewpoints of the articles written by the three foreign journalists remaining inNanking are quite different, none of them even alludes to the massacre of civilians of any sex orage, or to mass executions of prisoners of war.
Ara Ken’ichi has made a list of The London Times headlines between December 12, 1937 andJanuary 31, 1938. Since the British presence in China was longstanding, and British interests andsettlements there were substantial, there was a higher level of interest in Chinese affairs in GreatBritain than in the United States. Consequently, The London Times devoted more space to news
from China, which made the newspaper’s front page on the average of twice per week.
In December, the main news stories concerned the Shanghai Settlement, the assault on Nanking,the Soviet election, and the sinking of the Panay. Featured in January were the Spanish Civil
War and the change of government in France. After exhaustive coverage of the Panay incident,
Nanking reappeared in the news (January 15-16) in an article wired by McDonald from Shanghai.
Some excerpts follow.
Sunday evening [December 12] saw the first signs of the Chinese collapse, when a whole division
began streaming towards the River Gate. They were fired on and stopped, and later it was learned
that a general retreat had been ordered for 9 o’clock. The movement towards the gate leading to
the Hsiakwan river-front, the only way of escape, was orderly at first, but it soon became clearthat the Chinese defence of the southern gates had broken down, and that the Japanese weremaking their way northward through the city. The noise reached its climax in the early evening,by which time the southernmost part of the city was burning furiously. The retreat became a rout,the Chinese troops casting away their arms in panic when they found little or no transport to getthem across the river. Many frantically re-entered the city and some burst into the safety zone.
While retreating the Chinese fired the Ministry of Communications, the most ornate building inNanking, built at a cost of £250,000, and as it was filled with munitions the explosions caused atremendous racket.
(...)
On Monday morning the Japanese were still gradually moving northward, meeting with noresistance, and a systematic mopping-up had already begun. The foreigners thought that all
trouble was over, though groups of Chinese soldiers were still wandering about. Those coming to
the safety zone were told to lay down their arms, and thousands discarded their arms anduniforms, which made a huge pile in front of the blazing Ministry of Communications. The huge57

crowds of Chinese and the handful of foreigners hoped that the arrival of the Japanese would end
the confusion, but when the invaders began their intensive mopping-up operations, that hope wasdashed. The Chinese fled in terror, and the horror of the scene was accentuated by the wounded
who were crawling around imploring aid.
(...)
On Tuesday the Japanese began a systematic searching out of anyone even remotely connectedwith the Chinese Army. They took suspects from the refugee camps and trapped many soldiers
wandering in the streets. Soldiers who would willingly have surrendered were shot down as an
example.
No mercy was shown. The hopes of the populace gave place to fear and a reign of terror followed.
Japanese searched houses and began a wholesale looting of property along the main streets,
breaking into shops and taking watches, clocks, silverware, and everything portable, andimpressing coolies to carry their loot. They visited the American University Hospital and robbed
the nurses of their wrist watches, fountain pens, flashlights, ransacked the buildings and property,
and took the motor-cars, ripping the American flags off them. Foreign houses were invaded and acouple of German shops looted. Any sympathy shown by foreigners towards the disarmed
Chinese soldiers merely served to incense the Japanese.
Young men who might have been soldiers and many police constables were assembled in groups
for execution, as was proved by the bodies afterwards seen lying in piles. The streets were litteredwith bodies, including those of harmless old men, but it is a fact that the bodies of no women
were seen.106

Photographs of the sinking Panay, taken by McDonald, occupied a great deal of space in theJanuary 4 and 5 editions, but by the time he returned to Nanking, the situation there was back tonormal. In any case, not one photograph of Nanking appeared in the newspaper, perhaps because
there was nothing of interest to capture on film. And again, there were no references to amassacre or to mass murder. Other than those mentioned above, no other noteworthy articles
about Nanking appeared in The London Times.
The Sunday Express, which reportedly sold far more copies than The London Times, carried two
feature articles about Japan during that same period of time. The first (January 19) was a reporton the sinking of the Panay. The second (January 23) was an editorial speculating about future
Japanese foreign policy. The only other article printed described the assault on U.S. Consul
Allison.
Returning to the American press, the weekly newsmagazine Time ran three articles that referredto the situation in Nanking. The first appeared in the December 27, 1938 issue. An excerpt
follows.
At the last resting place of his old friend [Sun Yatsen] it was General Matsui’s duty last week tocomplete the butchery of those Chinese troops, tragically misled, who, against the advice given
by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s German military advisers, had been left to defend Nanking.
It was a tiresome job, lining up hundreds of prisoners and shooting them down batch after batch.

58

However, according to foreign correspondents who witnessed some of the executions, Japanesesoldiers invited Japanese sailors as their guests and apparently all of them “thoroughly enjoyedit.”All [the Chinese] knew that to be found in possession of a uniform or a gun meant death. Rifles
were broken up and thrown into piles to be burned. The streets were strewn with discarded
uniforms and munitions.107

This seems to be a reworking of the report Durdin wrote for the New York Times. Whatever thecase, it does not describe a massacre.
The second article (February 14 issue) was essentially a reproduction of a report written by
Archibald Steele for the Chicago Daily News, which read in part:As the Japanese net tightened some of the soldiers went nearly crazy with fear. I saw one
suddenly seize a bicycle and dash madly in the direction of the advancing Japanese vanguard,then only a few hundred yards distant. When a pedestrian warned him of his peril he turned
swiftly about and dashed in the opposite direction. Suddenly he leaped from his bicycle and threw
himself at a civilian and when I last saw him he was trying to rip the clothes from the man’s back,at the same time shedding his own uniform.
The Japanese were bent on butchery. They were not to be content until they had slaughtered
every soldier or official they could lay hands on. ... One Japanese soldier with a rifle stood overthe growing pile of corpses with a rifle pouring bullets into any of the bodies which showed
movement.
This may be war to the Japanese, but it looked like murder to me.108

The third article, a synopsis of material that had appeared in newspapers, appeared in the April
18 issue. The magazine’s owners were obviously hostile toward the Japanese, since this article
congratulated the Chinese on their victory at Taierzhuang, and included some pejorative
comments about Japan. Apparently, Time’s editors viewed the Second Sino-Japanese War as oneof the top news stories, since they ran an article about it in every issue, in the “Foreign News”
section. In 1938, they selected Chiang Kai-shek as “man of the year.” But even Time neverclaimed that the Japanese had perpetrated a massacre in Nanking, nor did it accuse Japanese
troops of murdering tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent women and children, or disarmed
Chinese soldiers.
We have described the content of newspaper and magazine articles published in the two Western
nations most hostile to Japan, the United States and Great Britain. Japanese “atrocities” nevercreated a worldwide sensation. Japan was never censured by the nations of the world. Fujiwara’s
assertion is categorically false.

C. Foreign Journalists Inspect Former Battle Sites in Nanking
59

The American, British, and French media failed to write about the “Nanking Massacre” only
because there was no massacre. Further evidence exists in the form of a tour of Nanking andenvirons by Western journalists, which took place in the summer of 1938, the year following theJapanese occupation. Members of the Shanghai Foreign Press Club had asked permission to visit
former battle sites in Nanking. Japanese military authorities granted their request. A group of 1516 journalists chartered a plane and flew to Nanking. The visitors set their own schedule, andinspected sites of their own choosing. Members of the Japanese military’s Nanking Press Section
served as their guides. The journalists visited the hospital and the detention center for prisonersof war in the former Safety Zone. Accompanying them was Domei Tsushin Nanking
correspondent Koyama Takeo, who kindly provided his records of the experience, along withphotographs.
According to Koyama, the visitors asked probing questions about the hostilities, the number ofcasualties suffered by both sides, the state of public order after the fighting had ceased, andprisoners of war. Then they discussed the questions and responses among themselves. However,they neither asked about nor discussed the mass slaughter of prisoners of war or the massacre ofcivilians. These men were not shy. If they had heard rumors about such incidents, they would
surely have asked.
The group visited Zijinshan, Sun Yatsen’s tomb, Zhonghua Gate, Yuhuatai, Xiaguan, and Jidong
Gate, proceeding from there to Tangshuizhen and Mufushan. Not once did any one of its
members ask about a massacre.
Koyama adds, “I arrived in Nanking in the spring of 1938, and was stationed there for more than
three years. I never heard anything about a massacre. I covered every inch of the city while I was
there, so even a rumor would have reached my ears.”
Subsequent to the fall of Nanking, Gen. Matsui Iwane held two press conferences for foreign
reporters. However, no one asked him about Japanese atrocities in Nanking. He also met with
American and British military officials, on which occasion he apologized for the Panay andLadybird incidents. During his conversation with them, no one broached the subject of a
massacre. In an affidavit, Gen. Matsui swore that the first time he heard about the murder ofChinese civilians or the mass slaughter of prisoners in Nanking was on a radio program
broadcast by the U.S. military in Tokyo. Dumbfounded, he summoned his subordinates andordered them to conduct an investigation.

60

Chapter 15

No Gag Order Imposed by the Japanesein Connection with the Nanking Incident
The account of the Nanking Incident in one Japanese textbook states that “the Japanese people
were not informed about the facts,” implying that Japanese government or military officials
issued a gag order prohibiting anyone from writing or speaking about the Nanking Incident.
They did nothing of the kind.
The conviction that a gag order was imposed in connection with the Nanking Incident on the partof some proponents of the massacre argument probably stems from the fact that during theSecond Sino-Japanese War (especially between late 1937 and the spring of 1938), the works ofsome writers were banned. Other writers were prohibited from publishing any of their work for a
specific period of time. Still others were cited for violations of the Law Governing theDissemination of False Rumors, but this had nothing to do with the Nanking Incident. Similarlaws have been enacted by many nations in wartime, for obvious reasons.
Ishikawa Tatsuzo wrote a book entitled Living Soldiers, which was scheduled to appear in themonthly Chuo Koron in installments. Living Soldiers was banned as soon as the issue containing
the first installment (March 1938) came out, on the grounds that the author had violated theaforementioned law. The text of the censors’ decision on Ishikawa’s case follows.
Living Soldiers is a novel that tells the story of a unit of the Imperial Army, beginning with its
experiences on the North China battlefront and ending when it lands at Baimaojiang in central
China, in enemy territory, and participates in the invasion of Nanking. Almost every page ismarked by hyperbole or portrayals that cast doubts upon the observance of stringent rules thatgovern the behavior of members of the Imperial Army, as described hereunder.
4. Scenes in which Japanese soldiers brutally and indiscriminately slaughter enemy soldiers andnoncombatants;
5. Scenes that show Japanese soldiers looting in the South China battle zone, and create theimpression that looting is an integral part of military policy;
6. Scenes in which Japanese soldiers assault Chinese noncombatants while robbing them;
7. Scenes in which Japanese soldiers violently assault Chinese women and girls in order tosatisfy their sexual desires;
8. Scenes that portray Japanese soldiers as having lost the will to fight and longing to returnhome;
9. Scenes that depict Japanese soldiers as desperate men, both in thought and action.109

61

As readers will note, this ban concerned regulations prohibiting the slander of military personnel,
and was not intended to conceal events that occurred in Nanking, regardless of their nature.
An examination of the regulations in force at the time reveals that a joint order from the Ministryof the Army and the Ministry of the Navy, issued on December 13, instructed newspapers torefrain from reporting on incidents involving damage inflicted upon foreign nations’ ships by
Japanese military personnel on the Yangtze River (the Panay and Ladybird incidents). The ban
was lifted on December 15. Such orders were sometimes issued in advance, and at other times,
when deemed necessary. However, none was issued in connection with the Nanking Incident, notby the Ministry of the Army, the Ministry of the Navy, or the Foreign Ministry.
Furthermore, penalties were imposed on three occasions in connection with newspaper articles
about Nanking that violated regulations already in force governing the press. They concerned theDecember 17 edition of the Osaka Asahi Shinbun, the December 21 edition of the Tokyo
Nichinichi Shinbun, and the December 25 edition of the Kokumin Shinbun. The reason: The
newspapers in question had violated the Publishing Supervision Law, i.e., they had revealed
military secrets by running a story about a canal’s being constructed on the upper reaches of the
Yangtze by Japanese naval personnel.110
In the process of collecting data for this book, we asked every former soldier we interviewed
whether officers had imposed a gag order prohibiting them from writing about or even discussing
the Nanking Incident. In each case, the answer was no. We posed the same question to former
war correspondents, who replied unanimously that they were never subjected to any restrictions,save for restrictions they imposed upon themselves, something all responsible journalists do.

62

Chapter 16

A Massacre without Witnesses
A. What 120 Journalists Saw
When the Japanese occupied Nanking, a city the size of New York’s Manhattan Island,
approximately 120 Japanese journalists and photographers accompanied them. Not one of themwitnessed the massacre of women and children, or the mass slaughter of ordinary citizens or
prisoners of war (with the exception of two journalists, Imai Seigo and Suzuki Jiro, whose
accounts were fabricated). At that time, special correspondents for Japan’s leading dailies (Asahi
Shinbun, Tōnichi Shinbun,111 Yomiuri Shinbun, and Nippon Keizai Shinbun), local newspapers,
and wire services were stationed in Nanking. To a man, these correspondents were shocked whenaccusations of a “great massacre” in Nanking were made during the Tokyo Trials, as were
soldiers who had served in Nanking.
On August 31, 1982, Hara Shiro, Shanghai correspondent for the Yomiuri Shinbun at the time ofthe occupation (and then an advisor to that newspaper), made the following comment to a Sekai
Nippo reporter.
I didn’t hear about anything remotely resembling a massacre in Nanking until three months after
the city fell. Military authorities hadn’t issued a gag order, so I thought it was odd that I should behearing news like that long after the supposed fact. I contacted all our bureaus, but wasn’t able toobtain any definitive information. Most of the people I consulted believed that the “massacre”
was yet another Chinese propagandist ploy.112

In a book entitled The Truth About the Conflict in Nanking: The Story of the 6th Division,113
published in 1966, Tokyo Nichinichi Shinbun correspondent Goto Kosaku wrote along similarlines.
When the conflict in Nanking ended, I returned to Shanghai. Not long after that, I heard rumorsthat there had been a massacre in Nanking. Incredulous, I telephoned the Shanghai offices ofAsahi Shinbun, Yomiuri Shinbun, Domei Tsushin, and other newspapers. Each time the answer
was the same: “We haven’t seen or heard anything about a massacre.” I figured that this wasanother propaganda campaign launched by the enemy.

Recently, an article by Hatanaka Hideo describing his interviews of well-known military figures
who had served in Nanking and entitled “Interviews Conducted in Nanking on December 12,
1937” appeared in the magazine Sekai to Nippon.114 Of particular interest is the following
exchange between Hatanaka and Ishikawa Tatsuzo, which took place shortly before the latter’s
death. As mentioned previously, Ishikawa’s novel Living Soldiers was censored, and the author
did actually receive a prison sentence, though he was granted probation.
Ishikawa:

I went to Nanking two weeks after the ceremonial entry.

Hatanaka:

What sort of atrocities did you witness?
63

Ishikawa:

I saw no signs of a massacre — not one.

Hatanaka:

What are your views on the “Nanking Massacre?”

Ishikawa:

It would have been impossible to dispose of tens of thousands ofbodies in two or three weeks. Even today, I’m convinced that no
massacre ever took place.115

Ishikawa’s words are of particular importance for the very reason that his book was censored,
and he was treated like a criminal. In his book The Road to Nanking,116 Honda Katsuichi cites
Living Soldiers, referring to it as a source of powerful evidence that a massacre did indeed takeplace in Nanking, an action that must have infuriated Ishikawa.
Hatanaka also interviewed Hashimoto Tomisaburo, a colorful figure who headed the Shanghai
Bureau of the Asahi Shinbun in the late 1930’s. During the Tanaka administration, Hashimoto
served as secretary-general of the LDP,117 and as transport minister. Hashimoto and his team of
15 reporters were the first journalists to enter Nanking after the Japanese occupation. His
response to a question posed by Hatanaka follows.
The Nanking Incident? Never heard a thing about it. If anything like that had happened,reporters would have talked about it, you can bet on that. After all, news is their business.
I never even heard rumors of a massacre. We held meetings attended by every Asahi
Shinbun reporter based in the area. If there had been a massacre, someone would havementioned it, and even if they didn’t call it a massacre, our reporters would certainly havevoiced objections.

Hatanaka also interviewed Adachi Kazuo, the former Nanking correspondent for the Asahi
Shinbun. When Hatanaka telephoned him to ask about the “massacre,” Adachi’s reply was curt:“I saw no evidence of a massacre in Nanking. I have no idea who you are, but if you want me toattest to a massacre in Nanking, I cannot help you.”After a brief exchange during which Hatanaka identified himself and explained why he had
contacted Adachi, the latter agreed to an interview. Hatanaka asked about former Asahi Shinbun
reporter Imai Seigo, who claimed to have witnessed a massacre. Adachi’s comment was: “Imaiwasn’t in the habit of reporting on what he had actually seen. His talent lay in dramatizing stories
he had heard from others.”
In a roundabout way, Adachi was suggesting that an article that appeared in Bungei Shunju, inwhich Imai claimed to have witnessed the massacre of 20,000 persons, was suspect. His
appraisal is identical to that provided to this writer by Moriyama Takashi, also of the Asahi
Shinbun. Moriyama should know, since he shared a room with Imai in Nanking, and the tworeported as a team. Imai never mentioned anything about a massacre to him.
B. Testimonies of Japanese Soldiers and Journalists
64An eight-part series entitled “Japanese Witnesses to the Fall of Nanking,” written by Ara
Ken’ichi, appeared in the magazine Seiron, beginning in May 1986. Ara conducted exhaustive
interviews with newspaper reporters, photographers, and soldiers who witnessed the fall of
Nanking. He then compiled them into article form, without alteration. Due to space limitations,rather than providing a detailed analysis of this series, we will limit our discussion to the“massacre.” The numbers that follow refer to the installments cited.
1. Onishi Hajime, former captain and staff officer of the Shanghai Expeditionary Forces
Onishi, the first person Ara interviewed, was the youngest intelligence officer in the 2nd Section.
For approximately one year, he served as head of the Nanking Special Agency.
Onishi:I served under Cho Isamu. If he issued an order [instructing his men tokill prisoners of war], I never saw it, nor did I hear anything about it(...) in any case, it would have been extraordinary for someone in his
position to give orders of that sort.

Ara:

In his diary, Gen. Nakajima (Kesago), commander of the 16th
Division, wrote: “Our policy is to take no prisoners.” Some say that
this passage is proof that prisoners of war were massacred.

Onishi:“Take no prisoners” meant that we were supposed to disarm them andlet them go. The Chinese soldiers came from all over China, but it was
their country, so they could walk home.

Ara:

Did anyone in the Shanghai Expeditionary Forces mention that there
had been a massacre?

Onishi:No, the subject was never broached. Once I entered Nanking, I maderounds of the city, ensuring that military discipline and regulations
were observed.

Ara:

And you saw nothing?

Onishi:I witnessed a rape once.

2. Okada Takashi, former Army interpreter for Commander-in-Chief Matsui
There weren’t any corpses within the city, so I don’t think any atrocities werecommitted against civilians.
They say that there were fires, but I don’t remember any.

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I did hear stories about prisoners of war. I heard that someone had tried totransport them from Xiaguan to the opposite bank of the Yangtze ... while they
were crossing the river, chaos erupted and some of the prisoners were shot.
Okada Yūji, former major and Special Services officer, Shanghai Expeditionary Forces
During the conflict that ensued when we invaded Nanking, I noticed that some of
the Chinese soldiers were women. I saw a dead female Chinese soldier. Some ofthe stragglers resisted, and then there were soldiers who weren’t wearing uniforms.
I saw some of them being executed. Perhaps people saw their corpses afterwards,
and that’s how the massacre rumor got started.
3. Satō Shinju, former Tokyo Nichinichi Shinbun photographer
Ara:

They say there was a massacre.

Sato: I didn’t see it. That’s what they say, but by the 16th or 17th [of December
1937], street vendors were back in business. Not just in back alleys, but on
main streets, too. Also, a lot of Chinese people were wearing armbands
with the Japanese flag on them, and congregating around Japanese soldiers.
I don’t think they would have done that if Chinese people had been killedindiscriminately.
Ara:

When did you first hear about the Nanking Incident?

Sato: Not until after World War II. It was during the American occupation, so it
must have been 1946 or 1947. There was a radio program on NHK
produced by the GHQ called “Box of Truth.” On one of them I heard that
there had been a massacre in Nanking. That was the first time I heard
about it.
Asai Tatsuzo, former photographer for the Motion Picture Department of Domei Tsushin
Ara:

Was there talk of a massacre or anything like that among the Domei
Tsushin staff?

Asai: No, not a bit. There were a lot of stragglers, and soldiers in civilian
clothing. We believed that getting rid of [executing] them was an
unavoidable aspect of war.
4. Taguchi Toshisuke, Hochi Shinbun war correspondent
Ara:

They say that a massacre was perpetrated in Nanking.

Taguchi: I never heard about it while I was there. No one ever mentioned it.
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Hosonami Takashi, former wireless engineer, Domei Tsushin
Hosonami:

There were corpses in the pillboxes, and also on the banks of the
Yangtze. Some of them had been bound together with wire.

Ara:

How many bodies were there?

Hosonami:

About 100, I guess. They must have killed prisoners of war who
were in Tangshan.

5. Koike Shuyo, Miyako Shinbun reporter (entered Nanking on December 13)
Koike:All the houses in Nanking had been abandoned, so the city wasdeserted. You didn’t hear a sound. There was a weird, ghostly air
about the place — I didn’t see one cat or dog. I was shocked because
the streets were so still and silent. You would never have known that abattle had been fought there.

Ara:

What was the situation in the Safety Zone?

Koike:The refugees were upset when Japanese soldiers searched forstragglers but, generally, the Safety Zone was peaceful. There wasn’t
any food. The refugees were starving, and would beg us for food. I
found several sacks of rice at our lodgings, so I told one of the Safety
Zone leaders to go there with me. I gave him enough rice and otherfood to fill two large carts. But there were 60 or 70 thousand people in
the Refugee Zone, so I don’t think my contribution made much of adifference.

Ara:

They say that there was a massacre in Nanking. Did you
see corpses that might have led you to believe that one had
occurred?

Koike:

I don’t know if they were massacred, or died in battle, but there wereseveral bodies in the basement of a building that was underconstruction, near the central traffic circle ... also, on my way to
Yijiang Gate, I believe, in a truck, I saw a body that had been squashedflat. It looked as though it had been repeatedly run over ... at the docks
at Xiaguan, there was a shipyard, circular in shape, that looked like a
stadium. I saw piles of bodies that had been dumped there.

Ara:

About how many bodies did you see at the docks?

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Koike:More than five or 10 — maybe several dozen. I think they were
corpses of soldiers who had died in battle.

Ara:

Were there other bodies there?

Koike:

No.

Koike also mentioned that he had noticed a fire on Zhongzheng Road on December 13. This is
crucial evidence, since on that same occasion, he saw foreign reporters traveling in two
automobiles driving all around the city at full speed, the shutters of their cameras clicking away.
This information contradicts the widespread perception that Japanese military authorities did notgrant foreign journalists access to Nanking.
Higuchi Tetsuo, former Yomiuri Shinbun engineer
Higuchi: Since I had an automobile, I drove around the city every day.
Ara:

They say that the Japanese military perpetrated a massacre at aboutthat time.

Higuchi: Well, I don’t know anything about that.
Ara:

You didn’t see it taking place or hear about it?

Higuchi: I had no idea. I saw absolutely no evidence of a massacre. Yes, they
say that one occurred, but I don’t know where or how. The Zhongshan
Mausoleum and similar sites were intact. They hadn’t been desecrated.
I think that our soldiers killed people only when their lives were indanger, and they’re calling that a massacre.
6. Kanazawa Yoshio, former photographer, Tokyo Nichinichi Shinbun
After World War II, I heard that tens of thousands of people were slaughtered in
Nanking. I couldn’t believe my ears. When I was in Nanking, I walked all aroundthe city, but I never saw or heard any signs of a massacre.
I was there for about a month, but I neither saw nor heard anything that would
support the accusations I heard after the war. There couldn’t have been a massacre.
I simply cannot understand why they executed General Matsui.
Mori Hiroshi, Shanghai correspondent, Yomiuri Shinbun
The residents of Nanking were not hostile to us, and they didn’t seem to be afraidof Japanese soldiers. Quite the opposite — Japanese military personnel were waryof the Chinese because soldiers masqueraded as civilians.
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Japanese soldiers did take prisoners, but there wasn’t enough food to feed them,or facilities to house them. If they had let them go, the prisoners would haveresumed military activity. They said they really didn’t have any choice but toexecute them. An NCO issued the orders — a squad leader, I think.
7. Tani Isamu, former colonel and chief of staff, 10th Army
Tani: When I entered the city through Zhonghua Gate at about 11:30 a.m. on
December 14, I saw very few bodies there. At about 3:00 p.m. I thought
that, as commander of the Rear Section, I should inspect the occupied area.
Accompanied by a sentry squad from Headquarters, we made the roundsof the city in automobiles. When we arrived at Xiaguan, there was awarship moored there. I met with the captain. There were quite a few
corpses on that bank, perhaps 1,000, perhaps even two or three thousand.
More than half of them were clad in uniforms. The others were dressed as
civilians.
Ara:

Were they killed during the conflict?

Tani: I think they were shot by the 16th Division while attempting to escapefrom the city. Perhaps that was what was later referred to as a massacre.
Ara:

I’ve been told that there were corpses at Yijiang Gate as well. Did you see
them?

Tani: Someone wrote that there were a great many bodies at Yijiang Gate. I
went by there on the afternoon of the 14th, but there were no corpses thereat that time.
Tani opened his scrapbook, which contains a photograph of Yijiang Gate taken on December 14.
The photograph shows the gate with its three entrances, but there is not a single corpse in sight.
Tani: I also heard that there was a massacre at Yuhuatai, but there were nobodies there, either.
Yoshinaga Sunao, former major and operations staff officer, 10th Army
Yoshinaga:

I entered Nanking on the morning of December 13, throughZhonghua Gate.

Ara:

What was the situation in Nanking then?

Yoshinaga:

On my way to Chubei Bank, I encountered a Chinese family. They
didn’t arouse my suspicions, so I wrote a note on the back of my69

business card indicating that they should be permitted to cross thesentry line and handed it to them. Since families felt that it was safeenough to walk about the city that day (December 13), the situationin Nanking had obviously calmed down quite a bit.
Two or three days later I went to Xiaguan, on an operation.
There were quite a few dead Chinese soldiers on the wharf at the
Yangtze River — several thousand, perhaps. The 10th Army (theKunisaki Detachment) had attacked not only from the south sideof Nanking, but also from Pukou, so the corpses must havebelonged to soldiers killed during those attacks.
8. Kaneko Rinsuke, former captain and staff officer, 10th Army
Kaneko:I entered Nanking on the 13th or 14th. I didn’t see one corpse in thecity, nor did I hear a single shot fired.

Ara:

Then you heard nothing about a massacre at the time?

Kaneko:That’s right. Not a thing. When I heard about it at the Tokyo Trials, I
was astounded. I’m not trying to hide anything or hold anything back.
The truth is that I saw nothing of the kind in Nanking, nothing thatwould leave an impression of that sort.

Futamura Jiro, former photographer, Hochi Shinbun
Ara:

There’s been talk of a massacre in Nanking.

Futamura: I didn’t see anything like that when I was there. After World War II, I
was often asked about it. I resurrected my memories of the time I spent
there, but I had to ask the inquirers what they meant by “massacre.” I
have read what others have written about it. But there wasn’t any sitewhere people were murdered en masse like Auschwitz, you know. The
first I heard about it was when the Tokyo Trials were held.
C. Writers’ and critics’ accounts of their experiences in Nanking
Approximately 120 journalists and photographers entered Nanking subsequent to the Japanese
occupation. However, they were not the only Japanese civilians to visit the city. Renowned
commentators, writers, and poets, including Ōya Sōichi,118 Kimura Ki, Sugiyama Heisuke,
Noyori Hideichi, Saijō Yaso,119 Kusano Shinpei,120 Hayashi Fumiko,121 and Ishikawa Tatsuzō
were in Nanking when that city fell, or soon thereafter. Many other distinguished members ofsociety spent time there during the spring and summer of 1938. Upon their return to Japan, allthese visitors wrote reports describing their experiences, which appeared in magazines andnewspapers. Some of them gave lectures.
70

For instance, Sugiyama Heisuke wrote a series entitled “Nanking” for the Asahi Shinbun.
Kimura Ki wrote Early Spring in Jiangnan and Hayashi Fumiko, Journey to Nanking. Kobayashi
Hideo 122 penned From Hangzhou to Nanking. On the spur of the moment, poet Kusano Shinpei
and Noyori Hideichi, president of the company that published Business World, travelled to
Nanking together. Later, the former wrote A Land of Peace and Turmoil, which appeared in
Business World, and the latter, Travels in China. Both men spent a good deal of time exploring
Nanking and its environs, on foot and by car. Their accounts are vivid and detailed. However,none of the aforementioned accounts hints, even remotely, at a massacre.
Not long after World War II ended, the Tokyo Trials began. But even when criticism of theJapanese military and its tactics reached its peak, not one of these literary figures came forth withaccusations of a “Nanking Massacre.” The inimitable Oya Soichi, who was superbly capable oftrenchant criticism, both oral and written, was no exception. As long as he lived, Oya dismissed
accusations of a Nanking massacre.
D. What This Writer Saw in Nanking
This writer, too, visited Nanking in August 1938, subsequent to the Nanking Incident. I spent
about a month in that city, on assignment for Pan-Asia magazine. In September, along withHayashi Fumiko and a few others, I travelled with the 6th Division units headquartered on theright bank of the Yangtze, beginning with the invasion of Hankou in September. In November,our party was with the first unit to attack Wuhan.
Gen. Matsui Iwane, who was also chairman of the Pan-Asian Association, had instructed me toinspect the Nanking area, mainly to gauge the degree of public safety and the residents’ reactions
to the occupation. He had given me several letters of introduction. I was just a war correspondent,
but the heads of the Nanking Special Agency and the Press Bureau went out of their way to assist
me, ensuring that I saw every inch of the city. I visited Tangshuizhen, Xianhemenzhen, Jurong,and Pukou, as well as former battle sites in Nanking and areas in the city’s immediate environs,
including Xiaguan, Yuhuatai, and Zijinshan. My lodgings were in a communications barracks
near the Drum Tower, which was located right at the entrance to the Safety Zone. Sentries werestill posted there, checking civilian passports. Inside the Safety Zone, I saw the infamous thieves’markets, street hawkers, and row upon row of vendors’ stalls. The Safety Zone was a beehive ofactivity, and Dafang Alley and similar places were bustling from early morning till night. By thattime, the population had swelled to nearly 500,000. I even spotted female employees ofJapanese-owned restaurants walking through the streets of Zouhui, Nanking’s red-light district,clad in summer kimono.
According to testimony given at the Tokyo Trials and reports issued by the International
Committee, acts of arson committed by Japanese soldiers had reduced more than one-third of thecity to ashes. However, these claims were patently false. With the exception of Xiaguan, I saw
much less evidence of destruction by fire than I had anticipated. In fact, I was surprised to findthe city in such an orderly state.
71

Needless to say, I heard no rumors to the effect that a massacre had occurred in Nanking six
months prior to my arrival, though I was told, everywhere I visited, about the bloody battles that
had ensued when the Japanese invaded the city. I will never forget the stories I was told about
the brave Chinese soldiers who chained themselves to the pillboxes at Yuhuatai, and continued
to fire their guns until they died, or the sight of the chains, which were shown to me.
The majority of war correspondents, photographers, writers, and poets who spent time in
Nanking are united in their insistence that they neither saw nor heard any signs of a Nanking
massacre until the Tokyo Trials commenced.
Further proof was supplied by Hosokawa Ryugen, former reporter and managing editor of the
Asahi Shinbun, and later a political and social critic with an immense following. In 1986, on the
Sunday preceding the anniversary of the end of World War II (August 14), Hosokawa appearedon “Candid Conversations About Current Events” aired by TBS (Tokyo Broadcasting System).
Some of his comments follow.
When I was managing editor of the Asahi Shinbun, I assembled all the reporters who had
been assigned to Nanking and asked them, individually, whether they had heard any
rumors about a massacre in Nanking. And every single one of them replied, in no
uncertain terms, that he had neither seen or heard anything to that effect ... I can statewith certainty that no massacre occurred in which tens or hundreds of thousands were
killed.

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Chapter 17

Faked versus Authentic Photographs:
A World of Difference
Documentary photographs are powerful tools that are often used to bring an event to life or toprove that it actually took place. Therefore, the abuse or outright manufacture of suchphotographs is particularly reprehensible.
In pleading their case, those who believe (or who would have us believe) that a massacre wasperpetrated in Nanking have made extensive use of photographs. When these so-called
documentary photographs were first disseminated, they were immensely effective in swaying
public opinion, convincing many people that the charges were accurate. However, whensubjected to scrutiny, every one of these photographs was proven not only to have no connection
with any event that took place in Nanking, but also to have been (1) faked or otherwise
adulterated for propaganda purposes, (2) supplied with spurious captions, or (3) of unknown (andtherefore, suspicious) provenance.
Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking includes 12 pages of photographs. However, we can state withcertainty that not a single one of them bears witness to a “Nanking Massacre.” (See A Study of“The Rape of Nanking” by Higashinakano Shudo and Fujioka Nobukatsu for a detailed
treatment of this subject.)123 In this chapter, we will show how they have been misrepresented,
focusing on three photographs from Chang’s book, which have also appeared in other books, aswell as newspapers and magazines.
There is no dearth of photographs that portray the true situation in Nanking in late 1937 andthereafter. As we stated in Chapter 16, 120 Japanese newspaper reporters and photographersentered Nanking along with invading troops. The journalists were extremely diligent about
gathering information and writing reports, which they wired to Japan nearly every day. As longas they didn’t reveal any military secrets, they were free to cover whatever they liked. They
explored every nook and cranny of Nanking, a rather small city, and took thousands ofphotographs. Those photographs were reproduced in hundreds of magazines and newspapers.
Not one of them (even those that did not appear in the media) depicts a massacre. Postwar
newspaper reporters, eager to prove that a massacre took place, have scoured photographic
archives, looking for evidence. Their rummaging has been fruitless, which is not surprising,since none ever existed.
We have reproduced some of the photographs from four collections featured in the Asahi
Shinbun, one of Japan’s leading newspapers, during the month following the fall of Nanking on
December 13, 1937 (on December 20, 22, 25, 30, and January 3). The newspaper also carried
articles about Nanking under the Japanese occupation. It would be mistaken to construe these as
propaganda photographs. They are genuine photographs taken by representatives of one of thedozen or so Japanese newspapers covering Nanking. Furthermore, they were published as soon
as they were received, and were not altered in any way. These photographs present a true pictureof life in Nanking at the time, and demonstrate that there was absolutely no basis for accusations73

of a massacre. (Unfortunately, they have been preserved only in reduced size, so they are not asclear as we would like. But they are authentic records of the situation in Nanking after the
hostilities had ended.
As we mentioned earlier, there are thousands of contemporaneous photographs that speak thetruth about Nanking, which include those taken by individuals as well as journalists. Currently,
we are in the process of assembling and cataloguing these photographs, which we hope todisseminate in the near future.

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A. Faked or Misrepresented Photographs in The Rape of Nanking
Example 1
This photograph has been reproduced in many publications (e.g., in the May 21, 1998 issue ofNewsweek). However, it is a total fake — a composite created for propaganda purposes.
The fakery is easy to detect if you look at the shadow cast by the man at the center brandishing a
Japanese sword, and that cast by the soldier to his right. They are facing in different directions.
Furthermore, the soldier with the sword is wearing a type of jacket never worn by Japanesesoldiers. Any Japanese would be shocked to learn that this photograph had fooled the world’s
media.

Example 2
The photographer’s name and the site where the photograph was taken are unknown, but we arecertain that it has no connection with the Nanking Incident. This photograph has appeared inseveral books, eventually metamorphosing into evidence of the “Nanking Massacre.” One ofthose books is A Collection of Photographs of the Japanese Invasion of China124 issued by the
Xinhua Publishing Co. in 1984.124
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The photograph made its next appearance in 1997, in the second edition of a book edited by Shi
Yong and bearing the same title as Chang’s book, The Rape of Nanking, which contains aphotograph identical to this one (Photograph 2A). Its caption reads: “According to an article in
the August 4, 1984 edition of the Asahi Shinbun, this is one of three photographs brought back toJapan by a former soldier who saw action in Nanking, and now resides in Miyazaki.”125
However, the Asahi Shinbun article turned out to be totally erroneous. Another former soldier
named Sato Susumu, a resident of Kanagawa Prefecture came forward and announced that he
was in possession of a photograph identical to the one reproduced by the Asahi Shinbun. Mr.
Sato joined the 19th Engineer Battalion at Huining, near the border between North Korea andChina, in October 1931, and was assigned to guard duty at the border. Toward the end of thatyear, he bought 10 photographs, all similar in nature, which were being sold as souvenirs at a
combination stationery store and photographer’s studio in Huining. One of them was thephotograph in question. The Chinese caption on the photograph purchased by Mr. Sato reads“Heads of Bandits Shot to Death in Tieling” (Manchuria). The bandits were shot andsubsequently decapitated by the soldiers of Zhang Xueliang (1898- ), Manchurian warlord and,for a time, Nationalist government supporter.
Photograph 2B (which appears both in A Collection of Photographs of the Japanese Invasion ofChina and Shi Yong’s The Rape of Nanking, and which is identical to another of the 10 owned
by Mr. Sato) shows soldiers using a large hay cutter to sever a man’s head. The soldiers are
wearing Nationalist uniforms, so they are Chinese, not Japanese. The Asahi Shinbun, realizing its
error, printed an apology in which it retracted the August 4 article in its entirety.
However, A Collection of Photographs of the Japanese Invasion of China maintains that theheads in this same photograph are those of Chinese murdered while defending their nation
against the Japanese. Its authors have miraculously transformed bandits executed by Nationalist
soldiers into Chinese massacred by Japanese troops. In The Rape of Nanking, Shi Yong, inspiredby the erroneous article in the Asahi Shinbun, claims that the severed heads are presented as
victims of the conflict in Nanking. Going a step further, Iris Chang asserts that this photographconstitutes proof of the “Nanking Massacre.” This is another example of the depraved methods
used to concoct “evidence.”

76

77

Example 3
The provenance of this photograph has been ascertained. It was taken by former soldier Murase
Moriyasu. The version that appears in Chang’s book has obviously been trimmed, for reasonsthat are not clear to us (Photograph 3-2 is the original). Murase took this panoramic photographat the juncture of the Yangtze and Jia rivers. Takahashi Yoshihiko (former major and head of anobservation party attached to the Headquarters of the 2nd Independent Mountain Artillery
Regiment), who took part in a conflict on the upper reaches of the Yangtze at Xinhezhen, waskind enough to provide an explanation. At about 6:00 a.m. on December 14, 1937, Takahashi’sunit encountered a large group of enemy soldiers who had fled Nanking through Yijiang Gate, at
Xinhezhen. An intense battle ensued. Though greatly outnumbered, the Japanese persevered andfinally, at about 11:00 a.m., prevailed. Their opponents began jumping into the river. The
Japanese fired at them from the bank, killing most of them. Their corpses were carried by thecurrent to the confluence of the Yangtze and Jia rivers, where this photograph was taken. Since
most of the bodies are facing in the same direction, it is obvious that, carried by the current, theydrifted downstream, clustering as they neared the riverbank.
This is, without a doubt, a ghastly scene. However, these men were combatants who were killedduring a war. They cannot rightly be called massacre victims, as we argued in Chapter 1. What
are we to make of a nation that attempts to gain the sympathy of the international community bycomplaining that its war dead were victims of a massacre?

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81

B. Authentic Photographs Portraying Life in Nanking After the Conflict
Photographs from Asahi Shinbun features
Asahi Shinbun Feature No. 1: December 20, 1937
Title: “Peace Returns to Nanking: Joyful Residents of Nanking Welcome the Imperial
Army” (photographed by Asahi Shinbun correspondent Kawamura on December 17)

Photograph 1: “Soldiers Enjoy Shopping in Nanking”(By the fifth day of the occupation, outdoor stalls had cropped up all over the city. Note that thesoldiers are unarmed.)
Photograph 2: “Now that the Imperial Army has entered Nanking, farmers can tend their fields
outside the city in safety”
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Photograph 3: “A group of returning refugees escorted by the Imperial Army”(With peace restored, residents who had evacuated to areas outside the city, felt that it was safe
to return to their homes, and streamed back into the city. See Chapter 3, p. 19.)
Photograph 4: “An open-air barbershop in a peaceful city”(Open-air barbershops have long been
a common sight in China. In this photograph, smiling adults and children are wearing homemade
armbands depicting the Japanese flag. By the fifth day of the occupation, street vendors selling
all sorts of wares were open for business, and soldiers strolled around the Safety Zone without
their weapons.)
Asahi Shinbun Feature No. 2: December 22, 1937
Title: “Yesterday’s Enemy Is Today’s Friend: Japanese Acts of Kindness” (photographedby Asahi Shinbun correspondent Kawamura)83

Photograph 1: “Wounded Chinese soldiers receiving medical treatment”(Wounded members of the Nanking Defense Corps, abandoned by their commander, Tang
Shengzhi, are treated by a Japanese army physician and a member of the medical corps.)
Photograph 2: “Hungry prisoners of war are fed by Imperial Army soldiers”(Compliant prisoners were treated kindly.)
Photograph 3: “With the guns of war now silent, good will reigns in Nanking”
Photograph 4: “Training Unit Staff Officer Maj. Shen Boshi chats with the commander of the
Tayama Unit”(The Training Unit was the Chinese Army’s elite division. Later, Maj. Shen later served in Wang
Jingwei’s administration.)
Photograph 5: “Friendships Blossom in Nanking”

Asahi Shinbun Feature No. 3: December 25, 1937
Title: “Nanking Smiles: City Sketches” (photographed by Asahi Shinbun correspondent
Hayashi)84

Photograph 1: “Children playing with toy tanks — Japanese soldiers join in the fun (onZhongshan Road, Nanking)”
Photograph 2: “Now that the war has ended, neighborhood children use a broken carriage as aplayhouse (in a residential area of Nanking)”
Photograph 3: “The kindness of members of the Imperial Army’s Medical Corps deepens SinoJapanese friendship (in the Refugee Zone)”
Photograph 4: “Hymns in praise of peace resound from a church garden (on Ninghai Road,
Nanking)”85

(John Magee was the pastor of this church — the Episcopal Church of Nanking. The
photographs he took were later used as evidence of a massacre, but the subjects of most of themare persons wounded in the war. Rev. Magee was a witness for the prosecution at the IMTFE,
where he testified for two full days, enumerating several hundred Japanese atrocities. However,when he was cross-examined by defense attorneys, he conceded that he had personally witnessed
only one murder. Pressed to elaborate, Magee said that he had seen Japanese soldiers kill astraggler who was trying to escape. But in his diary, he reveals that he had perjured himself — hewrites that he had not witnessed the murder. This photograph exposes the huge difference
between his claims of Japanese atrocities and the truth.)Asahi Shinbun Feature No. 4: December 30, 1937
Title: “Sino-Japanese Friendship Deepens as Nanking Prepares to Greet the New Year”(photographed by Asahi Shinbun correspondent Hayashi)

Photograph 1: “Chinese shoemaker offers to repair soldiers’ boots for the New Year.”Photograph 2: “A grateful mother receives milk for her child from a kind Japanese officer”
86Photograph 3: “The Medical Corps in action: Comforting a little boy as he is treated fortrachoma”
Photograph 4: “A Medical Department in action: Changing a dressing”(This feature is accompanied by an article entitled “Nanking Anticipates the Arrival of the New
Year, Complete with Rice Cakes.”)
C. Memorial Services Held for Chinese Soldiers Killed in Action
The photograph at the top of the next page was taken at a memorial service for Chinese soldierskilledin action. The service took place on February 8, 1938 under the auspices of Japanese military
authorities
and the Nanking Self-Government Committee at a cemetery near Yijiang Gate. Both JapaneseandChinese priests officiated. Col. Uemura Toshimichi, chief of staff of the Shanghai Expeditionary
Force,
wrote the following account of the service in his war journal on that same day.
We held a memorial service for Chinese soldiers at Yijiang Gate. They were our enemies, butofferingsof flowers to one’s fallen enemy is a demonstration of compassion, which is an integral part ofbushido.
Members of the Self-Government Committee, as well as Japanese and Chinese priests, were inattendance.126

The photograph at the bottom of the page was taken on February 28, 1938, the date on whichanothermemorial service, arranged by Lt.-Gen. Fujita, commander of the 3rd Division, was held at thesame site.
Otani Koyo, head priest of Higashi Hongan Temple in Kyoto, officiated.
These photographs are contemporaneous records, and they prove that Japanese military
personnel adhered
to the bushido code by praying for the repose of the souls of the enemy dead. They should also
negate theevil demagoguery that led the world to believe that Japanese soldiers murdered Chinese
indiscriminately or orchestrated a holocaust.

87

88

Notes

1. The “Outline Measures Towards Jewish Peoples” was adopted during the Konoe
administration on the basis of a decision made at a meeting of five senior ministers
on December 6, 1038. It reads as follows.
The maintenance of close, amicable relations with Germany and Italy is axial toImperial Japan’s foreign policy. Consequently, the welcoming of the Jewish
people into the Empire must, in principle, be avoided in light of the exclusionist
policy adopted by toward the Jews by our allies.
However, an exclusionary stance as extreme as that taken by Germany issimply incompatible with the spirit of racial equality that we have advocated fo
so many years.
Furthermore, such a stance would be extremely disadvantageous to the
Empire, given the present state of emergency it faces. We must introduce
foreign capital so that we may accomplish the economic construction needed towage war, and we must not allow relations with the United States to deteriorate.
For the aforementioned reasons, the following policy shall be adopted toward
the Jewish people.
Policy1) Jews who are presently residing in Japan, Manchuquo (Manchuria), andChina shall be treated in the same fair manner as are other foreign nationals;
no measures shall be implemented that discriminate against them in any
particular way.
2) Newly arrived Jews in Japan, Manchuquo and China shall be treated fairly
within the scope of general rules governing the entry of foreign nationals.
3) The invitation of Jews to Japan, Manchuquo and China shall be avided.
However, exceptions shall be made for those persons possessing special
attributes that may prove useful, e.g., capitalist, technical experts.

2. Between July and September, 1939, Sugihara Chiune, Japanese consulgeneral in Kaunas (Kovno), Lithuania, issued thousands of visas todesperate Jews. By doing so, he saved more than 6000 lives. It is often said
that I issuing those visa, Sugihara defied instructions from the Japanese89government. However, if tha had been the case, persons holding them would
been denied entry to Japan. For further information, see Hillel Levin, In
Search of Sugihara (New York : Free Press, 1996).
Lt.- Gen. Higuchi Kiichiro, head of the Harbin Special Agency, lent his
support to the first conference of the Jewish communities in the Far East
held at Harbin in 1937. Later he aided many Jews who had fled toManchuria. His good deeds have been recorded in Israelis Golden Book
(Register No. 4026).
Colonel Yasue Senko, head of the Dalian Special Agency, also assisted
Jews who escaped to Manchuria in 1938. Subsequently, he made a special
effort to protect Jews communities in Manchuria and Shanghai. His
contributions are also recorded in the Golden Book (Register No. 4028).
3. Indian legal scholar (1886-1967) who served as one of the justices at theTokyo Trials. Justice Pal submitted a dissenting opinion on the grounds that
retroactive application of the law was illegal.
4. Published as Paaru Hakase no Nippon Muzairon (Dr. Pal judges Japan not
guilty) (Tokyo: Keibunsha, 1963)
5. Published as Tokyo Saiban to wa nanika (Disguise the Tokyo Trials)(Tokyo Kogyo Shinbunsha, 1983).
6. Published as Nankin gyakusatsu no kyoko (Fabrication of Nanking
Massacre) (Tokyo: Nihon Kyobunsha, 1984).
7. Published as Matsui Taisho no jinchu nikki (War Journal of General Matsui
Iwane) (Tokyo: Fuyo Shobo, 1985). Researcher Itakura Yoshiaki wrote anarticle indicating that I had misread portions of Gen. Matsui’s handwritten
diary, which appeared in Winter 1985 issue of Rekishi to jinbutsu (History
and Personalities), published by Chuo Koronsha. This article inspired apiece entitled “Tanaka Masaaki Tampers with Gen. Matsui’s Diary,” which
ran in November 24 and 25, 1985 editions of the Asahi Shimbun. Honda
Katsuichi was one of the writers of the article, which can only be construed
as an underhanded means of exacting revenge my having pointed out thegross inaccuracies in his articles about the Nanking Incident, serialized in90the same paper. I sent a letter objecting to the campaign to brand me as afalsifier of history to the Asahi Shimbun, it was never printed. It is true that I
misread some portions of the diary (which was extremely difficult todecipher), but this was an error on my part, not an attempt to misrepresent
Gen. Matsui, whish would have been pointless. For full details, see “Hondas
hi! Nanji koso Nankin jiken no kaizan joshuhan” (Honda is a HabitualFalsifier of the Nanking Incident) in Getsuyo Hyoron, No. 834, written by
Itakura, who originally discovered the errors.
8. Published as Nankin jiken no sokatsu (Thorough Review of Nanking
incident) (Tokyo: Kenkosha, 1987).
9. The figure stated in the judgement against Gen. Matsui Iwane.
10. Harold Timperley, ed., What War Means: Japanese Terror in China (1038)(New York: Books for Library Press, 1969).
11. Hsü Shuhsi, ed., Documents of the Nanking Safety Zone (Shanghai: Kelly &Walsh, 1939) p.17 (Dec. 17, 1937); pp. 18, 20 (December 18); p.48
(December 21); p.57 (December 27).
12. Frankfurter Zeitung, December 19, 1937.
13. Tananaka Masaaki, ed., Matsui Iwane no jinchuu nikki (War Journal of
General Matsui Iwane) (Tokyo: Fuyo Shobo, 1985), p.134.
14. Hora Tomio, Nankin daigyakusatu no shomei (Proof of the Great Nanking
Massacre) (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1987), p.179.
15. City of Nanking Historical Documents Research Association, Shogen:
Nankin Daigyakusatsu (Testimonies: The Grear Nanking Massacre), trans.,
Himeda Mitsuyoshi and Kagami Mitsuyuki (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 1984),
p.178.
16. Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The forgotten Holocaust of the WorldWarⅡ (New York: Penguin Books, 19989, p.139.

91

17. Hsü, op. cit., pp. 14, 15.
18. IMTFE (International Military Tribunal for the Far East), Proceedings,
Court Reporter’s Transcript, August 29, 1946, p 4551.
19. Ibid., February 18, 1948, p. 40027.
20. Hsü, op. cit., p.84.
21. Lewis C. S. Smythe, War Damage in the Nanking Area, December 1937 toMarch 1938: Urban and Rural Surveys, On behalf of the Nanking
International Relief Committee (Shanghai: Mercury Press, 1938).
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Tanaka, op. cit., p.135.
25. IMTFE, op. cit., July 26, 1946, No. 35.
26. Ibid., July 29, 1946, No. 36.
27. Tokyo Nichinichi Shimbun, December 26, 1937.
28. Nankin Senshi Henshu Iinkai (Battle of Nanking Editorial Committee),
Nanking senshi (The Battle of Nanking), vol. 6 (Tokyo: Kaikosha, 1993).
29. Nankin Senshi Henshu Iinkai, op. cit., Vol. 7.
30. Nankin Senshi Henshu Iinkai, op. cit., Vol. 6.
31. See Guo Moruo, Konichisen Kaisoroku (Reflection on the War Against
Japan), trans. Okazaki Toshio (Tokyo: Chuo Koronsha, 1959). According toGuo, the national Party’s Political Bureau, headed by Kang Ze (Zhou Enlai
and Huang Qixiang were its deputy chairmen) established three departments

92

whose responsibilities were to disseminate anti-Japanese propaganda andgather information. Kang Ze was head of the special detachment thatcollected massive amounts of data in Nanking.
32. Timperley, op. cit.
33. Ishii Itaro, Gaikokan no issho (A Diplomatic career) (Tokyo: Yomiuri
Shimbunsha, 1980), pp.305-306.
34. Ibid., p.300.
35. Ibid., p.303.
36. Ibid., p.459.
37. Ibid., p.460.
38. Fujiwara Akira, Nankin daigyakusatsu (The Great Nanking massacre)(Tokyo: Iwanami Booklet, 1992).
39. Guo Qi, Lamenting the Fall of Our Capital ( reprinted as , Taipei:
Zhongwai Tushu Chubanshe, 1978); reproduced in Nankin Jiken Chosa
Kenkyukai Hen (Nanking Incident Research Group), Chugoku Kankei
Shiryo Hen (Chinese References), vol. 2 of Nankin Jiken Shiryoshu(Nanking Incident SourceMaterial) (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 1992), p.234.
40. IMTFE, op. cit., December 6, 1947, No. 309.
41. Hsü, op. cit.
42. In a letter to the Japanese Embassy dated December 17, 1937, John Rabe
Wrote, “On the 13th when your troops entered the city, we had nearly all thecivilian population gathered in a Zone.” Hsü Shuhsi, ed., Documents of the
Nanking Safety Zone (Shanghai: Kelly & Walsh, 1939), pp. 14-15.
43. IMTFE, op. cit., Exhibit No. 323 (excerpt from Prosecution Exhibit No.

931744), Court reporter’s Transcript, No. 210, read by defense attorney.
44. ibid., Testimony of James McCallum, Exhibit No. 309.
45. Lewis S. C. Smythe, op. cit.
46. Domei Tsushin (Federated Mews Agency), founded in 1936, was Japan’s
official news service until 1945.
47. Sekai to Nippon (Japan and the World), No. 413, 05 April, 1984.
48. Fujiwara, op. cit., pp. 28-29.
49. Infantry School, Disposition of Prisoners of War” in A Study of Combat
Methods Used Against Chinese Troops (Tokyo, January 1933).
50. Convention (Ⅳ) Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land and Its
Annex: Regulations Concerning the Laws and customs of War on Land
(The Hague, 18 October 1907)
51. Shinobu junpei, Shanghai sen to kokusaiho (The Conflict at Shanghai andInternational law) (Tokyo: Maruzen, 1932), p. 125.
52. Tabata Shigejiro, Kokusaiho shinko (International Law: Revised edition)(Tokyo: toshindo, 1991), vol.2 p. 203.
53. Paul Carell and Günter Böddecker, Die Gefangen: Leben und Überleben
deutschen Soldaten hinter Stacheldraht (The Prisoners: The Lives andSurvival of German Soldiers Behind Barbed Wire) (Frakfurt am Main:
Ullstein, 1980)
54. Hora, op. cit., p. 304.
55. Ara Kenichi, “Japanese Witnesses to the Fall of Nanking,” Seiron, May,
1986.

94

56. IMTFE, op. cit., November 11, 1947, No. 310.
57. Masui Koichi, Kankan saibanshi (Trials of Chinese Who Collaborated With
the Japanese) (Tokyo: Misuzu Shobo, 1977), p. 110.
58. Honda Katsuichi, Nankin e no michi (The oad to nanking) (Asahi Shibunsha,
1987) Paperback: Asahi Bunko, 1994).
59. Suzuki Akira, Nankin daigyakusatsu no maboroshi (The Illusion of a Great
Nanking Massacre) (Tokyo: Bungei Shunju, 1982), pp.189-197.
60. Boei Kenkyujyo Senshishitsu (defense research institute, Military History
Department), Senshi Sosho: Shina Jihen Rikugun Sakusen (1) (Military
History Series: Army operations During the Second Sino-Japanese war, Part
1) (Tokyo: Asagumo Shinbunsha, 1976).
61. Honda Katsuichi, “Nankin e no michi” (The road to Nanking) in Asahi
Jouranal 21 and 22, 07 and 14 September, 1984.
62. Estimates of the number of prisoners killed during skirmish vary (Kurihara,
5000-6000; Sgt. Hoshi Shunzo, 2000; and Maj. General Hirabayashi, 10003000). These differences are understandable, given the circumstances.
63. The shooting of prisoners who attempt to escape or who are insubordinate issanctioned by international law.
64. Committee for the Investigation of Japanese War Crimes Committed in
Nanking: Procurator of the District Court, Nanking, Summary Report on theInvestigation of Japanese war crimes Committed in Nanking (IMTFE
Document No. 1706, p.2).
65. ibid.
66. ibid.
67. ibid., p.3.

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68. IMTFE, op. cit., November 11, 1948.
69. City of Nanking Historical Document Research Association, op. cit., p.167.
70. For details, see Sankei Shinbun, 10 August 1985; Ara Kenichi, “Proof that
Nanking Masacre Was Invented) in Seiron, October 1985.
71. Compied by the City of Nanking Government secretariat, March 1939.
72. Ichiki Yoshimichi, ed., Nankin (Nanking) (Nanking Japanese Chamber ofCommerce, 1941).
73. Hora, op. cit., p. 201.
74. City of Nanking Historical Document Research Association, op. cit., p.171.
75. Hora Tomio, ed., Nankin jikenⅠ(The Nanking Incident: PartⅠ), Nicchuu
senso shiryo (references from Sino Japanese Wars), vol. 8 (Tokyo: Kawade
Shobo Shinsha, 1973), p. 389.
76. Tokyo Nichinichi Shinbun, November 25, 1937.
77. Smythe, op. cit., p. 7.
78. ibid., p.8.
79. Hora Tomio, Ketteiban: Nankin daigyakusatsu (The Authoritative Versionof the Great nanking Massacre) (Tokyo: tokuma Shoten, 1987), p.155.
80. ibid.
81. IMTFE, op. cit., August 29, 1946, No. 58.
82. He Yingqin, (ed. by Wu Xiangxiang), Modern Chinese History: The
Conflict With Japan (Taipei: Wenxing Shudian, 1948).

9683. Sankei Shinbunsha, ed., Shokaiseki hiroku (The Secret Memoirs of Chiang
Ka-shek (Tokyo: Sankei Shinbunsha, 1976), vol.12, p.69.
84. see article by Takagi Keizo in Getsuyo Hyoron (Monday Review), 27
February 1984.
85. Agnes Smedley, Battle hymn of china (1944; eprint New York: DaCapo
Press, 1975).
86. City of Nanking Historical Document Research Association, op. cit., p.218.
87. Research Committee on Current Affairs, Chinese Military Affairs in
Wartime, China in Wartime (Yan’an, 1941), p. 219.
88. City of Nanking Historical Document Research Association, op. cit., p.217.
89. ibid.
90. ibid
91. National government foreign minister.
92. Harold Timperley, ed. Gaikokujin no mita nihongun no book (Acts ofViolence Committed by Japanese Military Personnel as Witnessed byForeign Nationals) (Tokyo: Hyodensha, 1982); originally published as What
War Means: Japanese Terror in China (1938) (New York: Books for LibraryPress, 1969).
93. Fujiwara, op. cit., p. 9.
94. ibid. p. 9; Matsumoto Shigeharu, Shanhai jidai (Shanghai Sojourn) (Tokyo:
Chuko Shinsho, 1975), vol. 2 p. 250.
95. Matsumoto, op.cit., pp. 249-250.

9796. ibid., p. 250.
97. Suzuki Akira, Shin Nankin daigyakusatsu no maborosi (The Illusion of aGreat Nanking Massacre: New Version) (Tokyo: Asuka Shinsha, 1999).
98. modern Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Notable
Foreign Visitors to China: Modern Era) (China Social Science PublishingCo., 1981).
99. Matsumoto, op. cit., p. 251.
100. See Sekaito Nippon (Japan and the World), No. (?), pp. 447-449.
101. Tillman Durdin, “Japanese Atrocities Marked Fall of Nanking After
Chinese Command Fled,” New York Times, 09 January 1938.
102. Ibid.
103. Fujiwara, op. cit., p. 6.
104. “Ex-Chinese Officers Among Refugees: Colonel and His Aids Admit
Blaming the Japanese for Crimes in Nanking,” New York Times, 04 January
1938.
105. Durdin, op.cit.
106. McDonald, The London Times, 18 December 1937.
107. “War in China,” Time, 27 December 1937, p. 13.
108. “War in China,” Time, 14 February 1938, p. 17.
109. Ministry of the Interior, Shuppan keisatsu ho (Publishing Supervision Law
Bulletin), No. 110, p. 226.
110. ibid.

98111. Former name of Mainichi Shinbun.
112. Sekai Nippo (World daily Report), 01 September 1982.
113. Goto Kosaku, Nankin sakusen no shinso: Dairokushidan senshi (The truth
about the battle of Nanking; The Story of the 6th Division.) (Kumamoto
Nichinichi Shinbunsha, 1966).
114. Sekaito Nippon (Japan and the World), August 31, 1982.
115. Ibid., p.14.
116. Honda, op. cit., pp. 41-42.
117. Liberal Democratic Party.
118. An iconoclastic critic and acute observer of social trends, Oya (1900-70)
was awarded the Kikuchi Kan literary prize for Honoo wa nagareru(Flames Flows).
119. Saijyo (1892-1970) was a poet and educator who is perhaps best known formany song lyrics he wrote. During a sojourn in France, he was befriended
by symbolist poet Paul Valery. Representative of his poetry is the anthology
Roningyo (Wax Doll).
120. A poet known for his use of colloquial language, Kusano(1903-88) studied
in China. His best known work is Teihon Kaeru (Frog Poem), which portraythe human condition from view point of a frog.
121. one of Japan’s most highly regarded woman novelists known for her
realistic depictions of urban working-class life, Hayashi (1903-51) is best
known for her first novel, Horo ki (journal of a Vagabond), based on her
travels in Japan and abroad.
122. A literary critic whose writings span a wide range of cultures and genres,

99

Kobayashi (1902-83) was a prolific author whose works include a criticalbiography of Dostoevsky.
123.Fujioka Nobukatsu and Higashinakano Shudo, “The Pape of Nanking” nokenkyu (A Study on The Rape of Nanking) (Tokyo: Shodensha, 1999).
124. Photography Department, Xinhua News Agency, Riben qinhua tuoian
ahiliaoji (A Collection of Photographs of the Japanese Invasion of China)(Beijin: Xinhua Publishing Co., 1984), p. 90.
125. Shi Yong, ed., The Rape of Nanking: Undeniable History in Photographs(Chicago: Innovative publishing Group, 1997).
126. Nankin senshi Henshu Iinkai Hen, op. cit., p.299.
127. The name derives from the last speech given by Sun Yatsen in Japan in
1924.

100

Author: Tanaka Masaaki
Tanaka Masaaki was born in 1911 in Nagano Prefecture, Japan. In 1933, after graduatinfrom the Academy of Asian Stusies, he was hired by the Dai Ajia Kyokai (Pan Asian
Association).127 Mr. Tanaka organized the seinen Ajia Domei (Youth alliance for Asia),
an organization whose membership included Indonesians and Indians as well asJapanese, in 1934, and took part in its campaign to win independence for the nations ofAsia. In 1936, he accompanied Army General Matsui Iwane, the Association’schairman, on an inspection tour of China, and met with Chiang Kai-shek and othereminent Chinese. When the Association was absorbed into Dai Nippon Koa Domei(Japan Pan-Asian Alliance) in 1941, he remained on its staff.
Mr. Tanaka was drafted into the Army in December 1942, and assigned to theCentral China Field Ordinance Depot in Shanghai as a cryptographer.
He returned to Japan in 1946, and accepted a position as editor-in-chief of theNanshin Jiji Shinbun. Forced to resign from the newspaper during one of the purges
launched by Occupation authorities, he moved to Tokyo and went to work for Nippon
Seisan Kyoiku Kyokai (Association for Increased Productivity Through Education). In
1952, Mr. Tanaka published Justice Radhabinod Pal Absolves Japan. In 1958, he joined
the United World Federalist of Japan as secretary general, a position he held for 15
years.
Since then, he has served as managing director of International Piece Association,
and as a lecturer at Takushoku University. Through his work as a critic, he has
endeavored to disseminate Dr. Pal’s judgement in Japan’s favor, publicize the truth
about the conflict in and subsequent occupation of Nanking, to achieve independence
for the nations of Asia, and to dispel the masochistic perception of history now
prevalent in Japan. Among his many writings are Justice Radhabinod Pal Absolves
Japan, The Truth About the Tokyo Trials, The Fabrication of Nanking Massacre, The
war Journal of General Matsui Iwane, A 20-Year History of the United World
Federalist Movement, The United world federalist Movement in Thought in Action, Sun
Yatsen’s Quest for Sino-Japanese Harmony and Wang Jinwei, and The Road to
Independence of Asian Nations. .

101